Ebook: The Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosive Devices

Subtitle: 'The physics of the H-bomb is also the key to the unlimited energy of fusion'

From the Foreword

It has been an unavoidable fact of life since the Manhattan
Project that fusion science has been closely associated with research
on thermonuclear weapons. The H-bomb first brought the process
of fusion to public attention, two decades before the scientific
advances that have brought fusion energy to the threshold of energy
breakeven. The solution to the originally formidable problems of
substantial energy release from weapons systems has been an integral
part of the achievement of controlled fusion, particularly in inertialconfinement
fusion.
Some form of inertial-confinement fusion will ultimately produce
the most efficient and useful output of fusion energy, in all
likelihood. Inertial fusion therefore defines one of the most important
frontiers of civilian and military science about which citizens
must be adequately informed.
This is not possible at present, however, because many of the
basic ideas and results in inertial fusion are still classified. For many
years we of the Fusion Energy Foundation have fought to change
this situation.

About the Author:
Dr. Friedwardt Winterberg, a pioneer in inertial-confinement fusion,
is considered the father of impact fusion for his early work on
thermonuclear ignition by hypervelocity impact. Now a research
professor at the Desert Research Institute of the University of
Nevada System, he has long been at the forefront of research on the
implementation of nuclear energy for spaceflight. His concept of a
rocket engine propelled by a sequence of thermonuclear microexplosions,
in fact, was the inspiration for the Project Daedalus starship
study of the British Interplanetary Society. He received the 1979
Hermann Oberth gold medal of the Hermann Oberth-Wernher von
Braun International Space Flight Foundation for his work on
thermonuclear propulsion.
Born in Berlin, Germany in 1929, Dr. Winterberg became
fascinated with spaceflight as a youth, by reading the writings of
spaceflight pioneer Hermann Oberth. He taught himself calculus at
the age of 14 in order to understand Oberth’s mathematical theories.
After receiving his doctorate in physics under Werner Heisenberg in
1955, he helped design the research reactor of the Society to Advance
Nuclear Energy for Naval Propulsion in Hamburg, West Germany.
Dr. Winterberg’s published work includes more than 130 scientific
papers and articles in many books. In 1963 he published the first
proposal for the ignition of a thermonuclear microexplosion by a
beam of microparticles accelerated in conventional particle accelerators.
And in 1967 he began a series of papers on the use of intense
electron and ion beams for fissionless thermonuclear ignition, culminating
in a 1969 paper describing the magnetically insulated diode
as a means of producing ultraintense ion beams.