Intelligence Blog

The A-bomb, or atomic bomb, has been used only twice in war, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and both times it has totally destroyed a large city in a single explosion.

Strictly speaking, the term atomic bomb includes the H-bomb, which also uses atomic power. But in general usage, atomic bomb is reserved for earlier weapons that work by nuclear fission, that is, splitting atoms. The hydrogen bomb works by nuclear fusion - joining small atoms together to make larger ones. Both fission and fusion release huge amounts of energy and radioactivity.

Nuclear fission

The huge power of an atomic bomb comes from the forces holding each individual ATOM of a substance together. These forces act over tiny distances deep within the atom itself. Every atom of every substance that exists is held together by them. The energy released by splitting one atom is tiny, but there are so many billion atoms in even the smallest piece of material that a great deal of power can be released from large quantities.

Most naturally occurring ELEMENTS (pure substances) have very stable atoms which are impossible to split except by using such techniques as bombarding them in a particle accelerator. But there is one natural element whose atoms can be split comparatively easily: this is the metal uranium. Its special property comes from the very huge size of its atoms; they are too big to be held together firmly.

Atoms are (for practical purposes) made up of three kinds of subatomic particles, tiny fragments of matter which are the same in all atoms of all elements. These are PROTONS and NEUTRONS which cluster together to form the NUCLEUS, or central mass, of the atom, and ELECTRONS, which spin in orbits around the nucleus. The lighter the element, the fewer the subatomic particles in its atoms.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Science Information.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.