▲ | dghlsakjg a day ago | |
AFAIK, you can just pack as much fuel as you want into the secondary to scale the size of a thermonuclear bomb. So yeah, there is no size limit. Interesting aside; the US had the dial-a-yield mechanism that allowed one bomb to deliver a selectable amount of energy, not sure what the mechanism for this was, however. As to your second sentence, pretty sure that’s what a MIRV is. | ||
▲ | chickenbig 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |
> not sure what the mechanism for this was, however. Boosting (injection of deuterium/tritium into the centre of the pit) causes a large increase in yield because fusion generates lots of high energy neutrons that go on to fast fission your (still compressed) pit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosted_fission_weapon | ||
▲ | dboreham 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |
Variable yield weapons presumably still exist. Particularly depth charges iirc. Usually the yield can be selected between two or more fixed levels rather than a continuously variable input. Often this is implemented with tricks such as disabling the secondary and/or disabling boosting in the primary. |