The U.S. government proudly announced on March 7 that it has for the first time detonated a thermonuclear weapon–in a complete, three-dimensional computer simulation, that is.
Two year ago, researchers working for Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) and Los Alamos (N.M.) national laboratories had separately modeled the three-dimensional unfolding of a thermonuclear explosion’s two major parts: an initial blast powered by nuclear fission and the gargantuan fusion explosion that the first blast triggers.