It is interesting how Ford, who was a physicist on Wheeler's team in the development of the bomb, shies away from giving too much away about radiation pressure...
This is all he says about the key to the working bomb's success aside from general comments about the Teller Ulam process. It is interesting that despite this circumspection , his excellency book was censured for giving away nuclear secrets!
Kenneth W Ford. Building the H Bomb :A Personal History...Not long after John Wheeler got back to Princeton after the test, he said to me, “Ken, we must have overlooked some energy-generating effect.” My response was, “John, given all of the approximations we had to make, and our seriously limited computing power, we were lucky to get within 30 percent of the right answer.” (I was counting down from 10, not up from 7.) Now, in retrospect, I have to wonder if my calculations underestimated the yield because we (the Los Alamos and Matterhorn teams combined) underestimated the compression. Perhaps the complex interplay of plasma pressure, ablation pressure, and radiation pressure (see page 157), studied with care in recent years by the independent analyst Cary Sublette,[12] added up to more than we took into account. We will never know. But it remains true that we squeezed remarkably good answers from a computer that today would be considered laughably inadequate.
Let it be noted that Kenneth W Ford is a pilot who has written about his passion for flying... In Love with Flying (a memoir) written in 2007.
The subject, even at its simplest, out of context of bombs and reactors, is fascinating...