The destructive product of fusing atoms is the hydrogen bomb. Fortunately, this kind of nuclear bomb has never been used to settle global conflicts or in the hand of a mad man given the manic pleasure of destroying life on Earth. Technically, this fusing process is known as nuclear fusion. Since by conventional wisdom extremely high temperature is required, the process is usually called thermonuclear fusion. The initiation temperature is in the order of 10 millions degrees, giving enough kinetic energy for the positively charged nuclei to tunnel into other nuclei and become trapped by inelastic collision and begins to feel the attractive strong color forces. Fusion reaction occurs in all stellar systems and because of the large amount of energy produced thermonuclear fusions are usually self-sustaining once ignited.

Fusion was the key to the eventual understanding of stellar evolution. Its discovery does not have the usual fanfare or secrecy as that of discovering nuclear fission. It took 10 years more or less for controlled nuclear fission to reach the engineering stage. However, controlled thermonuclear fusion remains a scientist’s dream today. As early as 1934, Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) who already won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908 for his pioneering works in radioactivity, together with two of his younger colleagues at Cambridge discovered the first sign of hydrogen fusion. Then in 1938, Hans Bethe (1906-2005) identified a sequence of thermonuclear fusion reactions from hydrogen to carbon as the source of the energy that powers stellar systems. It took 29 years for the authoritative scientific community to recognize Bethe’s carbon cycle plus the lower temperature proton-proton chain process of fusing atoms and awarded him the 1967 Nobel Prize for Physics. Nonetheless, cryonuclear fusion requires a quantum theory of the spacetime continuum as the squares of zero-point energies of the quantum vacuum fluctuations.