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Sketch thing is that perhaps they're try to design an hydrogen bomb that doesn't require a fission primary. Use a laser to ignite the first stage, which ignites
by Gibbon1 4y ago
Sketch thing is that perhaps they're try to design an hydrogen bomb that doesn't require a fission primary. Use a laser to ignite the first stage, which ignites the next and so on. What if you can get 100X boost per stage, three stages gives you a gain of 1 million.
- jboy55 4y agoThere is just basic h-bomb efficiency gains here. By lowering the energy requirement for the fission primary by finding more efficient ways to control/generate the X-Rays you can use a smaller and smaller primary. It also occurs to me how analogous this research is to the early x-ray laser tech, that Teller claimed could shoot down warheads for the Star Wars program in the 80s. Those designs had rods that would amplify and focus the x-rays from a nuclear bomb on incoming warheads. If you could initiate the x-ray chain reaction from a laser, you would be able to launch these without breaking the 'no nuclear weapons in space' treaty.