One possible way to start a nuclear fusion reaction

If you could initiate a fusion reaction with explosives it would have been done by now. Fusion requires huge amounts of power to start a reaction. That's why h-bombs (fusion bombs) have a detonator made out of an a-bomb (fission bomb).

Fission bombs as detonators are old school, they've been done for decades. I'm talking new ideas that are outside the box because, if we think that the way it's always been done is the only way it can be done, we will be left in the dust when someone like me asks the audacious question that hasn't been asked before, and stumbles onto new possibilities. How many times the power of the current class of C-4 explosives would it take to get pressures high enough to initiate a fusion reaction? It has to be quantifiable.

"How many times the power of the current class of C-4 explosives would it take to get pressures high enough to initiate a fusion reaction?"

A typical nuclear bomb has a yield of several kilotons (1 kilonton = 1,000 tons) of TNT. You do the math.

Here's a quantity for you:

40,000,000K.

That's the minimum temperature required to initate a fusion reaction. You need several times that to sustain one. No amount of C4, or any other chemical explosive, can create that kind of heat.

That number sounds quite a bit higher than the ones that I'd seen before unless you're talking about doing it at atmospheric pressure. The conditions enabling a fusion reaction to occur would vary considerably with increases it pressure. With higher pressures the atoms or ions would be packed much more closely together and theoretically should enable a brief fusion reaction to occur at correspondingly lower temperatures. This would tend to support the theory behind cold fusion. I believe that you wouldn't actually need the entire explosive force and heat of the fission bomb that is at the heart of today's hydrogen bombs. It probably is true that these fission bombs are orders of magnitude stronger and hotter than any explosives that were available when the H bomb was developed, maybe 1,000,000 times as much. But what if we only needed 1,000 times as energetic an explosive to do the job? Our top scientists have made major strides in recent years in the explosives field.

This link may be of interest, it utilizes compressed gas driven pneumatic rams impacting a set of stationary anvil pistons (of all things) to compress the plasma. How very "Steam punk".

http://www.gizmag.com/general-fusion-nuclear-prototype/12420/

The only references I have seen regarding explosives were for one-shot particle experiments only (which is the article you originally cited) and nuclear pellet star drives. The problem with explosives is that the reaction is not self sustaining, requiring a constant stream of explosives (which is not practical for a power reactor which needs MANY reactions a second to keep a self sustaining reaction going). Lasers are also being used in place of explosives, the development (and experiments continue....

Pressure, temps and concentrations required to initiate "fusion" are well beyond ones achieved with any known type of explosives and the like. And we should be thankful for that because it would be much easier for this technology to get to the wrong hands.
-Although I'm not so sure there are any "right" hands for it at a "wrong" time-