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There have only ever been two nuclear devices used on anyone--one was dropped on Hiroshima, the other on Nagasaki. They worked on the principal that if you get enough fissionable material in the same place at the same time, you'll get a runaway chain reaction that will cause the material to explode. So they figured out how much was enough to do this, stuck half of it at each end of a long tube, and put a lump of explosive behind one of them. When they threw this bomb out the back of an airplane, a sensor in the bomb detonated the explosive. It forced the two pieces together and the resulting explosion leveled the city they dropped it on. This is way too expensive to do on a large-scale basis, and the only reason they did it was that they needed something to use Right Now and they didn't really know how to make good bombs. They've found out since then that if you squeeze the atoms in a piece of material really close together it will cause the same kind of runaway chain reaction, so that's what they do now--build a sphere out of uranium and put explosives around it. When you throw this out the back of an airplane and set it off, it squashes the ball of uranium, which causes a runaway chain reaction, then an explosion that levels the city they drop it on.

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