how come in a nuclear explosion, a small mass has an enormous destructive power?

Answer 1

Because Uranium is so dense and unstable that in the reaction, the antimatter is divided by the energy and thus splits the atoms at an exponential rate.

Answer 2

It all comes down to the scale of the forces involved. Think of it this way:

A metal nail can be held up by a very small magnet. The nail has the gravity of the entire planet pulling on it, but the little magnet holds its own. Gravity, the weakest force in the universe is easily overcome by magnetism.

Now again, observe the magnet and the nail. The magnet attracts the nail, and the two stick together. The force stopping the two from crushing each other is called the weak nuclear force. The weak nuclear force is made by the electrons of the atoms in one object repelling the electrons in another object. This is the force that keeps solid objects from moving through one another. The weak nuclear force is what keeps you from walking through a wall for instance. If you take the magnet and place it on one side of a piece of cardboard and you put the nail on the other side, the nail will be attracted by the magnet, but the nail will NOT pass through the cardboard. So we see that the weak nuclear force is much much stronger than magnetism.

Now we look at the Strong Nuclear force (the one that's responsible for a nuclear explosion). This gets a bit more esoteric, as the interaction are on the microscopic scale and cannot be seen in everyday life. All objects in our world are made of of individual atoms. Atoms themselves are made up of a nucleus (made of neutrons and protons) and electrons. As we learned in the last example, electrons repel each other. This places enormous amounts of force on the neutrons and protons that make up the nucleus. The nucleus can hold its own against the weak nuclear force though, because it is held together by the Strong Nuclear Force.

When an atom bomb is detonated, the nucleus of an atom is split releasing the energy of the Strong Nuclear force.

As we've explained, the strong nuclear force is many many times stronger than magnetism, and many more times stronger than gravity. All from one atom.

So, when a small sphere of plutonium no bigger than a baseball, but containing millions of atoms, is "fused" you can imagine the power released by this.

Answer 3

All mass has an enormous amount of energy held within it. The nuclear explosion is the only way we know of releasing this energy. It's the power that drives stars.

Answer 4

E=mc^2

Essentially the atom itself is being split in the case of a nuclear reaction, where most of the mass is converted into pure energy.

And from there what happens is a chain reaction happens between atoms, which is why the explosion is so large. At one point it was thought that the bomb might destroy the world because of the chain reaction, but as it turns out the chain reaction doesn't last forever...thankfully ;)

Answer 5

Essentially because matter is pretty strange stuff. You could think of it as energy that's been so concentrated that it becomes solid enough to roller skate upon.

Nobody could figure this out until our instruments became sensitive enough to deal with the nucleus of the atom. When we took these apart, it turned out that we got lots of energy, and that the sum of the parts weighed less than a whole nucleus. It was a lot of energy exchanged for a tiny bit of mass, and that's how we began to learn that the two were the same thing.

Answer 6

I assume that when you are talking about Nuclear explosion, you are referring to bombs. Firstly there are two types, nuclear Fission (atom bomb) and nuclear fusion (Hydrogen bomb). Nuclear Fission is the most common method used in creating nuclear bombs as compared to nuclear fusion method and the reason is because nuclear Fission yields vast amont of energy for a given input energy to start the reaction. on the other hand, a Nuclear fusion requires a vast amount of energy Input to yield even higher amount of energy. normally fusion is

To answer your question Directly, when a Nuclear bomb (Nuclear fission) occurs, one large nucleus of an atom, splits into two or more smaller nuclei. for example a free nutron is made collide with the uranium (U-235) which is stable to create an unstable uranium (U-236) which in turn fissions into Ba-141 and Kr-92. when this occurs in a nuclear bomb, there is a release of relatively large amount of binding energy and three free nutrons which inturn attack other U-235s to cause a rapid chain reaction, and in process releasing vast amount of energy.

this is why a tiny nuclear explosion in combination with a rapid chain reaction among unstable atoms can release enormous destructive power.

Answer 7

E = Energy potential of the mass in question
m = mass in question
c = light speed (a huge number)

e=m*c^2

Even if you have a small mass, c squared is a really very big number. One gram of mass has around 21 KTons worth of energy stored in it. A nuclear reaction is really ineffecient - converting only 40% of the reacting mass to energy - at best.

Answer 8

Well, in the case of nuclear fission, the splitting of atoms into smaller pieces releases the nuclear bonds energy.

In the case of a fusion bomb - heavy heavy hydrogen (tritium) is fused, creating heavier particles, also releasing a tremendous amount of energy...

For more information - http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb.htm

-dh

Answer 9

the mass is converted into energy completely...there is a lot of energy in matter, when you burn something you are not releasing the energy in the atoms...they don't use uranium...they use plutonium...an atomic explosion splits atoms,but a thermonuclear bomb uses an atmoic bomb to bring a special formof hydrogen at the bomb's center to critical mass by squeezing it under immense pressure...this causes the hydrogen to form helium...andin the process someof the particles are converted to energy

Answer 10

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