Three Bombs Detonate at Once! (Part One)

"Mercury antimony oxide?"

At the words Da Yu had just spoken,

Wang Haoran froze. A few seconds later, the question burst from his lips:

"Comrade Yu Min, do you mean red mercury?"

Da Yu nodded slightly.

"That's right. Red mercury."

Wang Haoran's brows furrowed at once, and doubt crept into his voice.

"Comrade Yu Min, although every country's nuclear weapons research is classified as a state secret, people know a little about the materials involved—after all, the properties of many substances are well established."

"As far as I know, mercury antimony oxide isn't a known neutron-source material, is it?"

Just as Wang Haoran had said,

only three countries had mastered hydrogen-bomb technology: the Bear, the Eagle, and John Bull.

All three had classified every detail of their hydrogen-bomb programs as top secret. Even the Bear, which had fairly good relations with the Rabbits, had never let a single letter slip.

On the other hand,

although the Rabbits couldn't get their hands on that information, they could derive some of it from first principles.

For example, neutron scattering processes, and neutron sources.

A neutron source was a fission bomb's ignition device. Its purpose was to maximize the energy released in a nuclear explosion—in other words, to make sure the chain reaction reached the required number of generations.

If the nuclear material became subcritical through thermal expansion before reaching that number, the bomb would be a dud.

To make that step work, the choice of neutron-source material was actually quite limited:

It first had to be radioactive. It also needed to release as many neutrons as possible, and have as large a scattering cross-section as possible. In practice, only a handful of substances met those requirements.

In theory, the best neutron source for a conventional nuclear bomb was a polonium-beryllium source. The