The explosion's mushroom cloud traveled 30 miles into the atmosphere. Ivy Mike's detonation was so powerful that it vaporised the Elugelab Island where it was detonated, leaving in its place a 164-foot-deep crater. When the government's decision was belatedly announced in the annual Defence White Paper in 1955, in terms that left no doubt that Britain would use the deterrent rather than submit to Communism, Attlee remarked that, in his experience, possession of nuclear weapons did have an effect on the rulers of other countries. Ivy Mike was the world's first hydrogen bomb and had a yield of 10.4 megatons, making it 700 times as strong as the first atomic bomb. The belief that Britain should have such influence was shared by the Leader of the Opposition. The explosion force achievable far surpasses that of atomic bombs, the destruction equivalent is that of several megatonnes trinitrotoluene, a chemical. The major consideration put forward by Churchill in Cabinet for developing a British hydrogen bomb was the effect it would have on Britain's influence in world affairs, and therefore on her ability to prevent precipitate action by the United States. The Russians detonated a thermonuclear device in August 1953 and their first true hydrogen bomb in November 1955. A hydrogen bomb falling on a city could kill a million people, compared with the 50,000 fatalities to be expected from an atomic bomb. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki exploded with the yield of 15 kilotons and 20 kilotons of TNT, respectively, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. The Americans exploded their first thermonuclear device on 1 November 1952, less than a month after the first British atomic bomb test, and between 1 March and they carried out a series of tests showing that they had mastered the techniques of making hydrogen bombs. deuterium and tritium cannot be considered less dangerous than an ordinary atomic bomb.The period covered by this chapter begins with the Churchill government's decision in the summer of 1954 to produce a British hydrogen bomb, and ends with dependence on the American Polaris system to deliver it. In round figures we expect: Deuterium-tritium bombFission bomb Dose to the tissues50,000 x 10 −6 r40,000 x 10 −6 r, Dose to the bones50,000 x 10 −6 r88,000 x 10 −6 r Number of mutations (in a population of 2♵ x 10 9)50,00040,000 Number of cases of leukaemia (in a population of 2♵ x 108)15,00026,000 Thus on the score of radiation injury to the world population, a clean hydrogen bomb operating by the reaction of. However, taking an estimate over the whole period of decay of the reaction products, it is found that ten-megaton bombs of the two types give rise to roughly the same dose of radiation to the tissues, and claim approximately the same number of victims. The total amount of energy liberated in radioactive decay by products of the explosion is three times greater in the case of a deuterium-tritium bomb than for an ordinary bomb. The special aspects of a ground-level hydrogen explosion are considered. The bomb exploded with a force estimated to be equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT, killing an estimated 66,000-80,000 people (long-term effects such as radiation poisoning and bombing-induced leukemia would eventually raise this estimate to 90,000-140,000), injuring 69,000 more, and leveling 4.7 square miles of the city. In this calculation the distribution of radioisotopes in animate and in inanimate matter is taken into account. A fission bomb, called the primary, produces a flood of radiation including a large number of neutrons. The doses delivered to the gonads and bones are calculated, and this leads to figures for the number of people born subsequently with hereditary defects and the number of cases of leukaemia (cancer of the blood). A hydrogen bomb is different than a regular atomic bomb, like the ones the US dropped on Japan near the end of World War II. In fact, the Ivy Mike test deviceit wasn’t a deliverable bomb, since it weighed 82 tonsused a Hiroshima-style fission bomb as the trigger to set off fusion reactions in a large dewar of. With a hydrogen bomb the principal agents are 14C and 8H, and with an ordinary bomb 90Sr, 137Cs and 1☌. An ordinary fission bomb and a clean hydrogen bomb, taken to be a deuterium-tritium reaction, are considered. An estimate is made of the danger to the world population arising from the creation of long-lived radioactive isotopes in nuclear explosions and from their dissemination over the globe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |