Arvin Ash

How Does an Atom Bomb Work? And why don't more countries have it? (2018x42)

Udgivelsesdato: Nov 25, 2018

At 5:30AM, dawn on July 16, 1945 near a small town called Alamagordo New Mexico, the course of human history was changed. The first atomic bomb was detonated that day, and sealed the fate of humanity. It took the work of many people to accomplish this engineering feat, but the principle leader of the Manhattan project, and the man considered the Father of the atomic bomb was Robert Oppenheimer. After witnessing its awesome power on that fateful day, Oppenheimer was so taken aback, he quoted a phrase from the sacred Hindu text Bhagavad Gita – “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” We know its awesome power, but how exactly does an Atom bomb work? An atomic bomb works on the principle that when you break up the nucleus of an Atom, a large amount of energy is released. Why? Because it takes a large amount of energy to keep the nucleus bound together. When you split it apart, that energy is released. The analogy is like a stack of bowling balls. If you were to shoot a ball into the stack, all the energy that you expended in stacking them together would be released. You can think of the nucleus of an atom being similarly “stacked” together. The larger the nucleus, the easier it is to split it apart. Scientists chose the biggest and heaviest nucleus that is found in nature to be the best candidate for splitting –Uranium. Uranium is unique in that one of its isotopes is the only naturally occurring element that is capable of sustaining a nuclear fission reaction. A Uranium atom has 92 protons, and 146 neutrons, together giving it an atomic mass of 238 – or U238 -- the heaviest naturally occurring element on the periodic table. U238 however is generally stable in nature, and is not fissionable or “splittable” because it is so stable. A very small portion of Uranium, when it is mined, is in the form its isotope U235. This isotope has the same 92 protons, but only 143 neutrons, or 3 fewer than U238. U235 is highly unstable. Which