Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Конструкція ядерної зброї" in Ukrainian language version.
How much larger can bombs be made through staging? One often finds claims on the public Internet that multiple stages could be combined one after the other, in an arbitrary large number, and that therefore the in-principle yield of a thermonuclear could be increased without limit. Such authors usually conclude this argument with the wise statement that nuclear weapons were made already so destructive, that no one could possibly think of increasing their yield even further, or that their military use would be pointless... The idea of adding four, ten, a hundred stages, in a disciplined and well orderly way, driving a larger radiation-driven implosion after the other sounds much more like a sheer nonsense than an in-principle design for an Armageddon-class weapon. It should be added that, to the best knowledge of this author, statements about the actual yield of the most powerful weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, either deployed or envisaged at some stage, were declassified, but no detailed hints at triple staging were released in the open from official sources. Also, there are (convincing) well-known sketches and some reasonable-looking calculations in the open literature about two-stage weapons, but no similarly accurate descriptions of true three stages concepts.
Modern boosted fission triggers take this evolution towards higher yield to weight, smaller volume, and greater ease of radiation escape to an extreme. Comparable explosive yields are produced by a core consisting of 3.5–4.5 kg of plutonium, 5–6 kg of beryllium reflector, and some 20 kilograms of high explosive containing essentially no high-Z material.
A simplistic computation of the work done in imploding a 10 liter secondary in the "W-80" ... the primary actually produced (5 kt)...
How much larger can bombs be made through staging? One often finds claims on the public Internet that multiple stages could be combined one after the other, in an arbitrary large number, and that therefore the in-principle yield of a thermonuclear could be increased without limit. Such authors usually conclude this argument with the wise statement that nuclear weapons were made already so destructive, that no one could possibly think of increasing their yield even further, or that their military use would be pointless... The idea of adding four, ten, a hundred stages, in a disciplined and well orderly way, driving a larger radiation-driven implosion after the other sounds much more like a sheer nonsense than an in-principle design for an Armageddon-class weapon. It should be added that, to the best knowledge of this author, statements about the actual yield of the most powerful weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, either deployed or envisaged at some stage, were declassified, but no detailed hints at triple staging were released in the open from official sources. Also, there are (convincing) well-known sketches and some reasonable-looking calculations in the open literature about two-stage weapons, but no similarly accurate descriptions of true three stages concepts.
How much larger can bombs be made through staging? One often finds claims on the public Internet that multiple stages could be combined one after the other, in an arbitrary large number, and that therefore the in-principle yield of a thermonuclear could be increased without limit. Such authors usually conclude this argument with the wise statement that nuclear weapons were made already so destructive, that no one could possibly think of increasing their yield even further, or that their military use would be pointless... The idea of adding four, ten, a hundred stages, in a disciplined and well orderly way, driving a larger radiation-driven implosion after the other sounds much more like a sheer nonsense than an in-principle design for an Armageddon-class weapon. It should be added that, to the best knowledge of this author, statements about the actual yield of the most powerful weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, either deployed or envisaged at some stage, were declassified, but no detailed hints at triple staging were released in the open from official sources. Also, there are (convincing) well-known sketches and some reasonable-looking calculations in the open literature about two-stage weapons, but no similarly accurate descriptions of true three stages concepts.
