David Kirtley

And that is what we want to avoid.

A lot of the key is recognizing that even though there are things called fusion bombs, the H-bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the hydrogen bomb has uranium in it.

It's still a fission bomb.

And so how this fundamentally works is that you have a fission reaction, a primary, and that creates fusion.

radiation that induces a fusion reaction with a small amount of fusion fuel that then boosts that uranium reaction again.

And so most of the energy, in fact, 90% of the energy in an H-bomb is all still from the uranium reactions themselves.

And if you take away that fissile material, that nuclear fission reaction, the fusion reaction doesn't happen at all.

In fact, there's been researchers that have, over the decades, tried to make an all-fusion bomb and been very unsuccessful at it.

The physics and the engineering don't support it can ever happen with our understanding today.

The topic we're talking about is more broadly called proliferation.

And this is the creation of nuclear weapons in the world and the distribution of those weapons.

And something we know as physicists and engineers is that fusion can't be used to make nuclear weapons.

We know that.

But that is not sort of widely known.

And part of what we went out to do is work with the proliferation experts in the world, the people who work to prevent nuclear weapons from being made, being created, being shared throughout the world, because we know the challenges, the geopolitical challenges that happen.

And we went to those proliferation experts, and we were worried they would have the sort of the same historical question of like, well, the word nuclear is infusion, so therefore it must be related.

And in fact, the total opposite happened.

What they told us is, please, please go develop fusion power plants absolutely as fast as possible.

The world needs this.

And the proliferation experts were telling us that otherwise people would start enriching uranium throughout the world.