The Teller-Ulam design is a nuclear weapon design used for megaton-range thermonuclear weapons or hydrogen bombs. It uses a fission bomb as a trigger to ignite a fusion explosion by compressing the fusion fuel with a radiation implosion. It is named after two of its chief contributors, Hungarian physicist Edward Teller and Polish mathematician Stanisław Ulam, who developed the design in 1951. Illustration credit: Fastfission |