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How does a nuclear bomb work?

I dont understand how a nuclear bomb works – i read that they dont even ‘explode’ on the ground!
If they dont explode on the ground then is it just the poisen gas that kills people in a nuclear fallout? whats the explanation: in a laymans term.

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13 Responses to “How does a nuclear bomb work?”

  1. Dan S said :

    they blow it up before it gets to the ground… they dont want just a hole in the ground, they want range.

    the explosion will kill people within a long distance, then the radiation goes even farther.

    the blast isnt small…

  2. rodders said :

    Bang

  3. Ryan W said :

    it blows everyone away.!!!

  4. bluey62626 said :

    they split the atom and yada yada they colide rlly fast just as bomb about to hits ground n boom

  5. The Drunken Fool said :

    They tend to airburst as this gives an overpressure over a wide area. If they explode on the ground the energy is absorbed by making a crater.

    The massive pressure, along with massive radiation on many spectra (infrared, gamma rays etc) is more than enough to squish/frazzle anything within a few miles.

    the only reason normal bombs explode on the ground is that they dont have the energy of a nuke.

  6. Ophelia O said :

    http://answerr.isimo-spain.com
    A very informative website, you can also get much information in website

  7. deighton2002 said :

    the blast is caused by the very large amount of heat released creating a shockwave. There is also a large amount of heat, light, x-rays given out. The fallout is worse the closer it explodes to the ground. It can be exploded very close to the ground or higher up in the air.

  8. Joey said :

    Its a secret how they work.

    The average john doe here will not be able to explain it to you ‘in laymans terms’. The only people who know how they work are the nuclear countries. If it was simple to explain how they work than Iran and all the other rogue states would have the atomic bomb already.

    It was prolly following roswell that the US military got the information from the visitors to make a atomic bomb. This is not earth technology – its from the stars.

  9. Jonathan L said :

    Nuclear bombs have barometric sensors in them measuring air pressure once they get to a acceleration and height or depth a neutron is sent into the uranium starting a nuclear fission chain reaction; the neutron hits a atom which releases 3 neutrons and energy which hits 3 atoms releasing 9 neutrons which hits 9 atoms releasing 27 neutrons etc really quickly the strong nuclear force( which holds protons and neutrons in the nucleus of the atom) gets released and the huge amounts of energy get’s released. the resulting blast kills people instantly if they are in close proximity the gamma rays will travel further causing huge problems in biological systems such as humans causing leukemia sterility and wipes out bone marrow stem cells causing a lack of immune function (in some cases) It isn’t gas that kill people it is high energy electromagnetic radiation which also causes all electric technology to stop working.
    Well that is a very incomplete description, but I hope it helps you to see what kind of threats nuclear bombs pose to everyone on earth. Also there is a theory that if too many nuclear bombs are used the earth will be covered in dust so much that light can’t effectively reach us causing a nuclear winter!!

  10. wilde_space said :

    This link is just what you’ve been looking for, then:

    http://www.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb.htm

    In layman’s terms, nuclear bombs work by splitting the atoms of unstable radioactive material, which creates a lot of energy in the form of heat, light and deadly gamma radiation. The immense heat creates a powerful shock-wave that can level whole cities to the ground.

  11. RobA said :

    Other answers have explained the principles of the chain reaction where one nucleus releases 3 neutrons, which potentially split three further nuclei and then 9 and so on until the radioactive material is consumed. It is the fragmentation of the nucleus that releases vast amount of energy as heat. This incinerates anything that will burn in its path and creates a massive pressure wave pushing gas at unimaginable temperatures out from the “ground zero”.

    However, to make sure the neutrons hit another nucleus you need to have a large enough mass of the Uranium, otherwise too many neutrons escape before they trigger another nucleus to split. The mass required is the “critical mass”. Nuclear weapons have the radioactive material in separate pieces kept apart and brought together only when the detonation is triggered.

  12. David said :

    During the years of the Cold war between the Western (USA and its allies) and the Soviet (now Russia and her then satellite countries) super powers; nuclear weapons created a ‘balance of terror’ that prevented a catastrophic global war. Nuclear weapon designs evolved rapidly during this ‘stand-off’ and, of course, their specifications remained closely guarded secrets.

    The first modern nuclear weapon was exploded on July 16, 1945, at a location 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what is now the White Sands Missile Range, which is headquartered near Alamogordo. This test, known as ‘Trinity’ was of an implosion-design plutonium bomb. The ‘Fat Man bomb, using the same conceptual design, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9th 1945. The ‘Trinity’ detonation was equivalent to the explosion of around 20 kilotons of TNT (Wikipedia).

    The design of this weapon is now largely, declassified and so I shall briefly discuss how it worked.

    The core or ‘pit’ of the ‘Fat Man’ weapon consisted of two hemispheres of a plutonium alloy (96 % Pu239, 1 % Pu240 and 3% Gallium) with a mass of about 6.2 kg. Inside of the core was a, still, secret initiator consisting of the metals beryllium and polonium. The initiator provided a ‘blizzard’ of neutrons to trigger the fission chain reaction within the ‘pit’ as the detonation proceeded. Surrounding the ‘pit’ was a boron ‘plastic’ neutron shield, which prevented stray neutrons from creating a premature detonation or ‘fizzle’. Outside of the neutron shield was a ‘tamper’ of about 50 kg of natural uranium (U 238) in two hemispheres. The ‘tamper’ was intended to hold the ‘pit’ together for long enough for a fission chain reaction to build up! Surrounding the ‘tamper’ were a series of ‘lenses’ of fast ( 60 % RDX, 39 % TNT and 1% wax) and slow (Baratol) explosives. These explosives were triggered by 30 detonators, which were all fired at the same instant by an electronic timing circuit.

    As the bomb was detonated, the fast and slow explosives produced a very smooth inward, spherical, shock front, which compressed the ‘tamper’ (inertial confinement) and crushed the plutonium ‘pit’ to about one-half of its volume. The ‘crushing’ process had to take less than 40 milliseconds to prevent spontaneous fission in the Pu240 from prematurely detonating the ‘pit’. The initiator then released its ‘blizzard’ of neutrons into the ‘pit’ and the fission chain reaction built up. As a neutron strikes a Pu239 nucleus, it fissions it into two smaller nuclei with the release of about 200 Mev of energy. Pu239 has an area probability of fission measured as 742 barns (1 barn = 10^-28 m squared). Furthermore, the fission reaction releases two neutrons, which ‘fuel’ the fission chain reaction. It was the ‘tamper’ or inertial confinement that held the ‘pit’ together for long enough for the chain reaction to become a catastrophic explosion – finally releasing about 21 Kilo tonnes of TNT explosive power. It is estimated that this first nuclear detonation, fissioned about 1 kg of plutonium and converted about 1 gram of matter into energy.

    Wikipedia comments that, ‘… “Fat Man” was detonated at an altitude of about 1,800 feet (550 m) over the city, and was dropped from a B-29 bomber Bockscar, piloted by Major Charles Sweeney of the 393d Bombardment Squadron, Heavy. The bomb had a yield of about 21 kilotons of TNT, or 8.78×1013 joules = 88 TJ (terajoules). Because of Nagasaki’s hilly terrain, the damage was somewhat less extensive than that in relatively flat Hiroshima. An estimated 39,000 people were killed outright by the bombing at Nagasaki, and about 25,000 were injured. Thousands more would die later from related blast and burn injuries, and hundreds more from radiation illnesses from exposure to the bomb’s initial radiations. The aerial bombing raid on Nagasaki had the third highest fatality rate in World War II after the nuclear strike on Hiroshima and the March 9/10 1945 fire bombing raid on Tokyo. …’

    Robert J. Oppenheimer, the leader of the bomb project, later would be persuaded to quote for a 1965 for a television broadcast:
    “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.’

    Let us hope that these weapons are never used again!!!

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