While Little Boy and Fat Man were so big that they required dedicated bombers to fly them to their targets, the North Koreans are aiming to develop a hydrogen bomb that could be installed on a missile, John Carlson, former head of Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, tells Michael Safi for The Guardian. The amount of energy is huge.”īecause hydrogen bombs (also called “thermonuclear bombs”) use fusion, they can be much, much smaller than atomic bombs. “In theory, the process is potentially infinite. “Think what’s going on inside the sun,” Takao Takahara, professor of international politics and peace research at Meiji Gakuin University, tells Yuri Kageyama for the Associated Press. Instead of blasting atoms apart, H-bombs slam isotopes of hydrogen together that sets off a chain reaction, making for much more energy-efficient and destructive explosions. This means that they harnessed the energy released by splitting either uranium or plutonium atoms. Hydrogen bombs, on the other hand, are fusion devices. And while atomic bombs like the two dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II are extremely destructive, hydrogen bombs can be at least 1,000 times stronger than their predecessors, The Globe and Mail reports.Īlthough the atomic bombs of World War II, which went by the code names Little Boy and Fat Man, used different fuels and triggering mechanisms, they were both fission bombs. Like other weapons, not all nukes are made equally. So why are people so worried by North Korea claiming it tested an H-bomb? While North Korea isn’t a nuclear superpower by any means, it’s been generally accepted that the tiny dictatorship probably has a few nuclear warheads in its possession, albeit lacking the missile technology necessary to launch them. North Korea’s new claims that it has tested a hydrogen bomb is drawing both fears and skepticism from politicians and experts.

Hydrogen bomb vs atomic bomb