Abstract
The characteristics of, and energy transfer mechanisms involved in, thermonuclear detonation are discussed. What makes the fundamental difference between thermonuclear and chemical detonation is that the former has a high specific energy release and can therefore be employed for preliminarily compressing the thermonuclear mixture ahead of the burning wave. Consequently, with moderate (megajoule) initiation energies, a steady-state detonation laboratory experiment with unlimited energy multiplication becomes a possibility.