A similar amount as they use for takeoff, but it's still very little compared to getting out of Earth's gravity well.

Yeah, the risk scenario would probably be more like everything goes perfectly until the last second and then it explodes.

I'm with you on Coulomb's law but I don't see how you're relating it to voltage.

A voltage difference can be defined as the work done to move a charged particle between two points. Work is force times distance. If you move the points further apart the work to move the particle stays the same - the average force is lower but the distance is higher.

For example you can imagine a negatively charged Earth and a positively charged spaceship, and imagine moving an electron from the Earth to the ship. Near the Earth the main force on the electron is repulsion from the Earth. Near the ship the main force is attraction to the ship. In between it's a combination of both, but the force is relatively low. You need to integrate along the path to calculate the total work. So you can roughly break this down into 3 sections - near the Earth, near the ship, and the middle section. If the objects move further away, this stretches out the middle section, making the force lower but the distance longer. The main contribution at each end stays about the same. This is hand-wavey but I think it helps give an intuitive sense that the integral will work out the same as distance changes.

You can also consider the case of two objects with the same charge (equally positive or negative). The voltage difference between them is obviously zero, regardless of distance. But from Coulomb's law you know there is a force between them (repulsive) that depends on distance.

It wouldn't be hydrogen gas, it would be a solid compound, probably Lithium-6 Deuteride. I think the questioner really wanted to know the total amount of fusion fuel so the estimate seems plausible for that (the whole bomb weighed 27,000 kg).

If they truly only cared about hydrogen atoms it would be less, but it's hard to imagine why someone would care about that specifically.

>The simple relationship E=mc2 tells us that 2.3 kg mass was converted to energy in the bomb, but a hydrogen fusion reaction only converts about 0.7% of the starting mass to energy. So they would have had to burn through at least 330 kg of hydrogen, and they probably started with much more since the efficiency of fusion won't be 100%.

>According to wikipedia, high yield nuclear weapons produce something like 5 megatons per metric ton of material, which would mean the Tsar Bomba had about 10,000 kg of hydrogen.

Just to interpret the comment:

2.3 kg is the mass of hydrogen which is converted to pure energy in a 50 MT bomb (which is roughly the yield of the Tsar Bomba, the largest bomb ever detonated). Eg. the total mass of bomb material after detonation is 2.3 kg less than the starting mass.

330 kg is the absolute minimum amount of hydrogen which would have been present in the above bomb based on 0.7% of it being converted to energy. But a real bomb would likely contain significantly more due to other inefficiencies.

10,000 kg is the estimate of the actual quantity of hydrogen in the Tsar Bomba.

Also keep in mind just asking how much material is used in a bomb is like asking how long a piece of string is. The above discussion was about a 50 MT bomb, but the largest weapon currently in the US arsenal, the B83, has a maximum yield of 1.2 MT and a total mass of 1100kg (not just hydrogen). Most are smaller than that. The W76, used on submarine missiles, is only 95 kg total with a 0.1 MT max yield.

>In addition, voltage decreases exponentially the farther the 2 reference points are from each other. If there were a voltage, all the particles in space would be pulled toward the earth.

Voltage isn't affected by distance, it's the electric field that drops exponentially as objects get further away.