(1) From 1957 until his death in 1976, Heisenberg worked on problems in plasma physics and thermonuclear processes.(2) Fast ignition offers a potentially simpler method to achieve thermonuclear fusion without some of the technical hurdles facing conventional inertial-confinement fusion.(3) When in 1949-50, the Soviet Union made its first nuclear bomb test, Teller pushed for the thermonuclear bomb as part of the U.S. defense program.(4) Since those temperatures generally amount to a few million degrees, fusion reactions are also known as thermonuclear reactions.(5) It represents a major step forward for the heavy-ion approach to inertial-confinement fusion, in which small pellets of thermonuclear fuel are compressed to the point of burning by beams of heavy ions.(6) Since the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen within stars gives you helium, some regions of the cosmos could easily accumulate more than their 8 percent share of helium, but, as expected, no one has ever found a galaxy with less.(7) More than Vietnam, it was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 that taught Kennedy vital lessons about the limitations and dangers of expansionism and brinkmanship in a thermonuclear age.(8) It has nuclear bombs, thermonuclear bombs; it has bombers, which are aging somewhat.(9) An intercontinental ballistic missile with a thermonuclear weapon would be deterrent enough.(10) In February 1956 Eisenhower approved a Joint Chiefs of Staff request for increased production of both very high-yield thermonuclear weapons and small warheads suitable for air defense.(11) The successful test of Sakharov's bomb in August 1953 ended America's thermonuclear monopoly and earned the physicist his first medal.(12) Don't worry though, this collision won't occur for another 3 billion years or so, by which time we'll all be long dead, having killed ourselves by much more mundane methods such as biological weapons or global thermonuclear war.(13) The first step in detonating a thermonuclear weapon is to ignite the high explosive that causes a shock wave to travel inward and compress the nuclear material the explosive surrounds, known as the pit.(14) Mounted in the stern structure of the vessel's central core were four thermonuclear reactors that used water as the reaction mass required to produce the ion streams that propelled the ship.(15) In the Sun, the process of thermonuclear fusion converts atoms of hydrogen into helium atoms, producing radiant energy.(16) Over the Sun's lifetime, the thermonuclear reactions would, according to theory, gradually change the composition of the core of the Sun and alter the Sun's overall physical structure.
