Quote:
Originally Posted by Precious_b
Waco is more or less correct on this.
According to Sakorof (I know i'm spelling his name wrong), the team of Russian scientist working on the bomb were being guided on the track that lead to success in making it. The team got curious as to how those above knew what they did. Seeing that the handlers did not want to expose how they knew such, told the scientist that another team was working on the bomb.
Side note, Sakorof made a better H bomb than we did.
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Andrei Sakharov is who you mean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei...uclear_weapons
In mid-1948 he participated in the
Soviet atomic bomb project under
Igor Kurchatov and
Igor Tamm. Sakharov's study group at FIAN in 1948 came up with a second concept in August–September 1948.
[11] Adding a shell of natural, unenriched uranium around the deuterium would increase the deuterium concentration at the uranium-deuterium boundary and the overall yield of the device, because the natural uranium would capture neutrons and itself fission as part of the thermonuclear reaction. This idea of a layered fission-fusion-fission bomb led Sakharov to call it the
sloika, or layered cake.
[11] The first Soviet atomic device was tested on August 29, 1949. After moving to
Sarov in 1950, Sakharov played a key role in the development of the first megaton-range Soviet hydrogen bomb using a design known as
Sakharov's Third Idea in Russia and the
Teller–Ulam design in the United States. Before his
Third Idea, Sakharov tried a "layer cake" of alternating layers of fission and fusion fuel. The results were disappointing, yielding no more than a typical fission bomb. However the design was seen to be worth pursuing because deuterium is abundant and uranium is scarce, and he had no idea how powerful the US design was. Sakharov realised that in order to cause the explosion of one side of the fuel to symmetrically compress the fusion fuel, a mirror could be used to reflect the radiation. The details had not been officially declassified in Russia when Sakharov was writing his memoirs, but in the Teller–Ulam design, soft X-rays emitted by the fission bomb were focused onto a cylinder of lithium deuteride to compress it symmetrically. This is called
radiation implosion. The Teller–Ulam design also had a secondary fission device inside the fusion cylinder to assist with the compression of the fusion fuel and generate neutrons to convert some of the lithium to tritium, producing a mixture of deuterium and tritium.
[12][13] Sakharov's idea was first tested as
RDS-37 in 1955. A larger variation of the same design which Sakharov worked on was the 50 Mt
Tsar Bomba of October 1961, which was the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated.
Soviet atomic bomb project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet...c_bomb_project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet...ed_feasibility
In 1945, the Soviet intelligence obtained rough blueprints of the first U.S. atomic device.
[38][39] Alexei Kojevnikov has estimated that the primary way in which the espionage may have sped up the Soviet project was that it allowed Khariton to avoid dangerous tests to determine the size of the critical mass.
[40] These tests in the U.S., known as "tickling the dragon's tail", consumed a good deal of time and claimed at least two lives; see
Harry Daghlian and
Louis Slotin.
One of the key pieces of information, which Soviet intelligence obtained from
Fuchs, was a cross-section for
D-T fusion. This data was available to top Soviet officials roughly three years before it was openly published in the
Physical Review in 1949. However, this data was not forwarded to
Vitaly Ginzburg or
Andrei Sakharov until very late, practically months before publication.[
citation needed] Initially both Ginzburg and Sakharov estimated such a cross-section to be similar to the D-D reaction. Once the actual cross-section become known to Ginzburg and
Sakharov, the Sloika design become a priority, which resulted in a successful test in 1953.
In the 1990s, with the declassification of Soviet intelligence materials, which showed the extent and the type of the information obtained by the Soviets from US sources, a heated debate ensued in Russia and abroad as to the relative importance of espionage, as opposed to the Soviet scientists' own efforts, in the making of the Soviet bomb.
The vast majority of scholars[like whom?] agree that whereas the Soviet atomic project was first and foremost a product of local expertise and scientific talent, it is clear that espionage efforts contributed to the project in various ways and most certainly shortened the time needed to develop the atomic bomb.[
citation needed]
Yet the research for the Soviet analogue of "classical super" continued until December 1953, when the researchers were reallocated to a new project working on what later became a true H-bomb design, based on radiation implosion. This remains an open topic for research, whether the Soviet intelligence was able to obtain any specific data on Teller-Ulam design in 1953 or early 1954. Yet, Soviet officials directed the scientists to work on a new scheme, and the entire process took less than two years, commencing around January 1954 and producing a successful test in November 1955. It also took just several months before the idea of radiation implosion was conceived, and there is no documented evidence claiming priority. It is also possible that Soviets were able to obtain a document lost by
John Wheeler on a train in 1953, which reportedly contained key information about thermonuclear weapon design.
Soviet nuclear bomb origin
