Unbelievable Power: The Physics of Nuclear Blast Waves

The power of the atomAt the beginning of the 20th century, major advancements in our understanding of fundamental physics led scientists to the discovery of nuclear energy. An unprecedented amount of power could in principle be released by combining (nuclear fusion) or breaking (nuclear fission) certain atomic species under special conditions. Nuclear fusion in particular was understood to be the process powering the immense luminosity of stars, including our Sun. Nuclear fusion is the light-bulb illuminating the vast living room of our Universe.Why so much energy?Burning fossil fuels releases chemical energy. This chemical energy is stored in the mild electromagnetic interactions between atoms in a compound. Nuclear energy, on the other hand, comes from the very central regions of the atom.  As the name suggests, it is stored in the nuclei, which are kept together by the strong force. The strong force is much stronger than all the other forces, including the electromagnetic one. As a result, nuclear fuel has an energy density about ten million times larger than chemical fuel. If your car was running on nuclear fuel, its gas mileage would be something like hundreds of millions of MPG. From light to darknessThe physics revolution that characterized the first three decades of the 20th century and led to the development of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, was followed by the second World War. In 1942, the United States started a very ambitious project to build a nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project, led by Robert Oppenheimer and gathering some of the best physicists on the planet, culminated with the successful Trinity experiment in 1945 (Fig.\ref{982837}). The first detonation of a nuclear weapon was the most shocking demonstration of the great power of science and the scientific method. Only less than a month later, two nuclear bombs were dropped over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in the end of WWII and the death of hundreds of thousands of people. The sheer destruction inflicted by the atomic bomb left an indelible mark on humankind's consciousness, formally starting a new era in the history of man. An era of greater responsibility. While no nuclear weapons have been purposely used in war ever since, more than 2000 nuclear tests have been performed after the Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions.