On November 1, 1952, the U.S. detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb, codenamed “Mike”, as part of Operation Ivy. It was the first full test of a breakthrough design created by Hungarian-American physicist Edward Teller and Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. Mike represented a remarkable feat of engineering, towering at 20 feet tall and weighing an impressive 74 metric tons. While not deployable as a conventional weapon, its significance lay in being the first nuclear device to derive a substantial portion of its explosive power from fusion, the process of atomic fusion, rather than solely relying on fission, the division of atoms. Its functionality relied on a fission reaction to ignite fusion within liquid deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen.
Mushroom cloud of the Ivy Mike test. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
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