File talk:Yellow Sun cutaway diagram.png

'Red Snow core' altered to 'Red Snow warhead'.

In nuclear weapons terminology 'core' has a quite different meaning to warhead.

'Core' refers to the fissile core of a fission device, in early designs an almost solid core, but in later weapons a shell of fissile material, and often of more than one fissile material. A 'composite core' or 'mixed core' would typically be concentric shells of plutonium and U-235, often filled with a boosting material, eg. tritium/deuterium.

A warhead can be a single entity of a fission device, boosted or not.

A warhead can also be a two or three-stage thermonuclear device comprised of a fission primary, used to trigger (or ignite) a fusion secondary. Red Snow is in this category.

Often, in UK and US designs, the fission primary and the fusion secondary will have different names, and the primary might also have a separate independent use as a lower yield weapon. Red Snow was in this category. Its primary was named Peter, an anglicised US W-34 Python fission device. Python was used alone in several other weapons, including the Mk-45 Astor torpedo, Mk-101 Lulu anti-sub depth charge, Mk-105 Hotpoint bomb, and others.

B.Burnell — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.132.243.67 (talk) 16:29, 17 May 2006 (UTC)