The Real Mechanism of Nuclear Explosion

Existing theories of nuclear explosion rely on nuclear fission mass defect and the mass energy relation to calculate macroscopic explosion yield. They can well fit terminal observed phenomena including experimental yield, fireball, shock wave and radiation. However, this paradigm not only lacks a complete physical chain for energy release and transmission starting from the underlying microstructure of matter, but also fails to answer where the enormous energy of a nuclear explosion fundamentally originates, in what form energy is pre stored inside matter, and the real physical process between mass and energy. Based on the theory of light origin and the photon cage model, namely the strong self locking virtual cage model, this paper conducts deduction. Protons neutrons and electrons are essentially closed bound structures formed by high energy gamma photons through strong self locking. The ontology of photons never changes and there exist only two states, trapped under self locking or propagating freely. When trapped, they exhibit material properties such as rest mass volume and charge on the outside, while photons inside the cage still travel at the speed of light. A nuclear explosion does not mean physical substance transforms into energy. Instead partial photon cages are shattered and high energy gamma photons originally trapped inside particles are released. Uranium 235 fission has two major pathways. Only the paired dual uranium fission pathway can shatter part of nuclear photon cages and release high energy gamma photons. The released primary high energy gamma photons strike secondary photon cages of environmental medium atoms and molecules and trigger the photon chain unlocking chain reaction. Photons continuously lose energy in repeated unlocking collisions. When photon energy drops below the dissociation critical energy level for physical particles, the chain unlocking terminates. Residual energy is converted into random thermal motion of air molecules and sequentially generates high temperature fireball visible light and high pressure shock wave. Around five percent of high energy gamma photons in the explosion fail to fully degrade and escape outward directly, corresponding to early gamma ray signals measured by instruments. This paper strictly distinguishes equivalent radiation temperature inside cages and real thermodynamic temperature of the environment and points out heat is a terminal secondary product of chain unlocking rather than the initial output of nuclear explosion. Meanwhile interpreted through physical processes of nuclear explosion, c squared in the equation E equals m c squared merely serves as a conversion coefficient. It does not represent mutual transformation between physical substance entity and energy entity. Trapping and releasing only change the bound state of photons while photons themselves have no change at entity level. This mechanism provides a complete physical interpretation framework for nuclear explosion ranging from fundamental energy origin to macroscopic explosion phenomena.