No such thing as far as I know. The only way we’ve yet been able to induce fusion in amounts sufficient to be useful in a weapon is by placing small amounts of hydrogen in the middle of a fission bomb and letting the intense fission reaction force the hydrogen atoms to fuse. There isn’t any fusion weapon that doesn’t involve a bomb as its main component, unless you’re talking about focusing sunlight or something.
The researchers 'roud here have been having troubles with ‘anomalous transport’ – collecting the energy constructively or in a concentrated way has only been done in short spurts. Magnetic containment equations still need lots of work - will probably be a number of decades before non-explosive/diffusive fusion-anything happens. For general info, try: http://www.plasmas.org/fusion-mag.htm
Thermonuclear fusion weapons scare the ba-jeezus out of me – I’ve looked up film on more than 30 of the 200-300+ (who knows) US in-atmospheric tests of such devices – each one of them freaks me out, every time.
There were some five-ton and ten-ton bombs about the place. Modified Lancasters dropped 'em on U-boat pens and railway viaducts, they needed the weight to penetrate the concrete. “Only” about 4 tons of this was explosive, actually Torpex rather than TNT and so with maybe a 5-TNTton yield.
The Tallboy (5,200 lb explosive, 12,000 lb weight in total) and the Grand Slam (9,135 lb explosive, 22,000 lb weight in total.)
IIRC from browsing around online, the Grand Slam was the largest conventional bomb dropped, but the US had a larger one built for the purposes of psychological warfare (or maybe they just didn’t get round to using it.)
What are fusion bombs like? Scary as fuck. A good book about them is “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb” by Richard Rhodes. They were turning islands into underwater craters with these things.
IIRC, they had the technology in the 50’s to make a hydrogen bomb so powerful you deploy it by throwing it in your backyard, because it’ll destroy all life on Earth, including your target, no matter where you detonate it.
Hydrogen “naturally” fuses into helium, generating massive amounts of energy, when the temperature and pressure are high enough. However, the places where that level of temperature and pressure are found are in the cores of stars. Detonation of a fission bomb produces that degree of temperature and pressure momentarily – long enough to cause a fusion reaction in a H-bomb.
Deuterium, tritium, and helium-3 will fuse to produce helium-4 (and other products that break down into it) at relatively lower temperatures than protium, “normal” hydrogen without neutrons. That’s why they’re required in fusion technology, whether bomb or controlled: getting the temperature up to where protium fusion occurs is neither feasible nor necessary for the uses we make of it. Wikipedia on nuclear fusion.
IIRC they went positive on the energy-meter about 10 years ago, though the gain wasn’t much.
Forget “all life” We can conceivable build a bomb big enough to destroy the entire planet. Of course, it would be a bomb you could see from orbit.
cite on the “all life” issue?
As I remember it, you do start to run up against some physical limits. After a certain “yield” size, you begin to get inefficiencies that don’t really allow you to scale up much more. (The reaction blows away the additional “fuel”, and it’s wasted)
My cite is my post. Just kidding, my cite was in my post, “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb” by Richard Rhodes.
IIRC, regarding physical limits, there was a limit to fission bombs, but not to hydrogen bombs. The H-bombs you can just keep making more and more powerful. The practical limit you come across there (again, IIRC) is that you eventually end up blowing a chunk of atmosphere into space, I thinkthe size of Pennsylvania, and if you make the bomb more powerful, you simply end up shooting off the same-sized chunk faster.
Of course, as soon as reach the level that a chunk of atmosphere that size is flying into space, thats going to fuck up the Earth pretty bad.
I know. I converted to nice round tons for the convenience of the reader.
Yeah, yeah, they build everything bigger and better in America. :rolleyes:
The real breakthrough with fusion-powered weapons won’t come until we can devise a means of sustaining a reaction in a small hand-portable device (if we ever can). With a power supply like that, it would probably be feasible to produce a weapon based on the principle of emitting a controlled beam capable of causing a cessation of organic functions. There was much speculation on this topic towards the close of the first quarter of the last century - about 75-85 years ago.
Perhaps if you were to stick a really big rocket on the rear end of the moon and slam it into the Earth 
There was a suggestion during a BBC documentary on Project Orion, that a larger nuclear weapon than could be launched from a bomber or ICBM could be put into orbit using an Orion space ship. A weapon of suitable size could have what were described as worldwide atmospheric effects.
I was joking, more or less.
Yeah. That’s why you switch to Anti-matter weapons if you really want to smack someone around… shiver I rue the day someone may actually contain enough anti-matter to build and test one of those monstrocities.
There are some limits to the explosive yield of a fission bomb, while a fusion bomb can be made arbitrarily large.
The US originated the slang of calling a fission bomb an “A-Bomb” (atomic bomb) and the fusion bomb a “H-Bomb” (hydrogen bomb). Early H-Bombs often “ran away”, generating much greater than expected explosive yields. The scientists had not yet learned to evaluate and quantify all the fusion reactions that went on. This led to a lot of unintentional cratering.
The first H-Bomb explosion “Mike” (at Eniwetok Atoll) wiped out the entire island and created a 1/2 mile hole 200 feet deep, because it was a large non-deliverable device done for mostly research purposes. The whole unit was nearly 3 stories high and sat at ground level. The yield was roughly 1.5 megatons, as I recall, which is about 1000 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. The fireball alone from that bomb would have wiped out the entire city of New York.
The modern H-bombs deployed by the US are in the 550-kiloton range. They’re also quite small.
I very much recommend Richard Rhodes two books “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” and its successor “Dark Sun”.
Fission based vessels refuel on a schedule that stretches to decades… and core lives are only getting longer as the designs improve. The major selling point is that it’s a relatively small, stable, and self-contained power plant that just keeps going and going and going.
Fusion offers none of those advantages.
Better yet, make a fission/fusion hybrid powerplant that purifies seawater and then bombards it with neutrons in the fission plant to make heavy water as feedstock to the fusion reactor!
You might be able to make a big sea-going fuel plant that chugged around in a circle stockpiling harvested/manufactured deuterium, He-3, et al… but it would probably be a bad idea to try to make it also function as a warship.