Loren Pechtel wrote:cthia wrote:Not necessarily. The current yield of our present nuclear bombs is limited only by our inability to solve the problems that have been solved in the Honorverse. I would imagine there are insane yields of nuclear devices in the Honorverse. After all, nuclear energy is nothing if not efficient.
There's no point to bigger bombs--once you get past 20 megatons the bomb's destruction doesn't go up much as you increase the yield.
There is one mission for bigger bombs--orbital bombs, either for EMP or thermal pulse. (A big enough bomb can light fires out to the horizon--and from very low orbit the horizon is very far away.)
We also know how to build bigger bombs. A normal hydrogen bomb uses the energy of an atomic bomb to compress the lithium deutride. The size of the bomb is limited by how much energy you have to compress it. (Which is not the full energy as you can only catch what's heading in the right direction.) There are two things you can do to increase the energy, though:
1) Most of the energy of the fission bomb just heads off in a direction without a second stage. You can place several second stages around the fission trigger (although using more than two second stages ends up with a bomb like a caltrop or jack, a pain to handle!) Each stage must be alike so they go off at exactly the same time. (You don't need nanosecond level timing, though--the fusion stage's timing is based on the materials used, no clock is involved.)
2) Fusion bombs are normally triggered by fission bombs but anything energetic enough will do the job. You can detonate a fusion bomb with another fusion bomb--stacking a second fusion stage in line with the first (it must be shielded from the fission stage by the first fusion stage or it will be destroyed before it detonates.) You now have megatons of energy to play with rather than just kilotons, the third stage can be considerably bigger than the second. You can even have a line of a fission bomb bracketed by two second stages which are bracketed by two third stages. If that's not enough you can extend the line with ever-bigger stages. There's no upper limit.
You are presuming a spherical bomb geometry rather than cylindrical. Once a relatively low yield fission bomb "ignites" a fusion reaction, that fusion reaction in concert with an X-ray reflecting casing can be exploited to create a shockwave in a cylinder of Li-D fusion fuel resulting in a bomb of arbitrarily large yield. The process can be enhanced by using U-238 in the casing that can either reflect of absorb Neutrons, sometimes resulting in a fission reaction, that releases more Neutrons. The Lithium-6 isotope then absorbs the Neutrons to fission into Tritium or Helium-3 Wich then fuses with the Deuterium.
There is a reason why high yield Hydrogen bombs are cylindrical or conical.