placed in charge of the investigation.The decision to move ahead with the hydrogen bomb development was made in response to U.S. perceptions that the USSR was close to porducing its own hydrogen bomb. Thermonuclear device testing was to begin in 1952, and in 1954, both the United States and the USSR had acheived hydrogen bomb capablitites. Since that year each side has developed nuclear arsdenals taht are almost entirely composed of fusion weapons, rather than fission weapons. They have reached a strategic conditon taht promises total destruction, this condition is now appropriatly and ominously called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).Early hydrogen bomb designs called for the use of deuterium, a hydrogen isotope of mass two, as the primary fuel. It was soon recognized that pure deuterium was difficult to burn, but that reaction coulf be speeded up by mixing tritium, a hydrogen isotope of mass three, with the deuterium. Since tritium does not occur does not occur in nature, several reaactors were built along the Savannah river, in South Carolina, to manufacture it. The light isotoope of lithium was bombarded with neutrons on these reactors to form tritium and helium. The tritium could then be burned with deuterium.The first completely succesful hydrogen bomb test involved an experimental device which burned pure deuterium liquefied under great pressure and low temperature. This device, which was detonated in the Mike test at eniwetok, ine the Pacific Ocean, on Novenber 1st, 1952, with a yeild of 10 megatons (the equivalent of 10 million tons of TNT), proved to be the viability of the basic ideals of a super-bomb.A year before the Mike test, scientists had shown a different way of using fusion in nuclear weapons, the so-called booster priciple. Unlike the super-bomb, which used a small atomic bomb simply to ignite the huge hydrogen burn that produced its tremendous yeild, the booster bomb used a neraly large fission explosion ...
