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- Disarmament: A Basic Guide
- Chapter
Nuclear weapons
- Author: Bhaskar Menon
- Main Title: Disarmament: A Basic Guide , pp 14-17
- Publication Date: December 2001
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.18356/eab113c7-en
- Language: English
The most dangerous weapons in the world are nuclear, which use the enormous amounts of energy released when the nucleus of a heavy atom such as uranium or plutonium is split in a chain reaction (fission), or when isotopes of a light element such as hydrogen combine in a thermonuclear bomb (fusion). The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each with the explosive power of 20,000 tons of dynamite (20 kilotons), have long been dwarfed. By the 1970s, the Soviet Union and the United States, which have 98 per cent of the world’s nuclear weapons, had in their arsenals thousands of 25 megaton warheads. (A megaton is equivalent to a million tons of TNT.) Far more powerful thermonuclear bombs have been tested.
© United Nations
ISBN (PDF):
9789213628553
Book DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18356/69a6cea5-en
Related Subject(s):
Disarmament
Sustainable Development Goals:
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