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Article

Thermonuclear Milestones

NOV 01, 1996
With the opening and discussion of decades‐old archives in Russia, we can reexamine many questions about the history of Soviet thermonuclear weapons development.
German A. Goncharov

The creation of atomic weapons, and later thermonuclear weapons, was an event of such epochal significance in the 20th century that its history has preoccupied scientists worldwide and the international community at large. Those who have participated directly in nuclear weapons programs do not, and cannot, remain aloof from revealing the facts of that history. Of special interest is the early history of thermonuclear weapons development in the US and the USSR, the first countries to detonate this most dreadful species of nuclear weapon. In these three articles I present a brief survey and analysis of the principal events that make up that early history.

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References

  1. 1. Materials from the Presidential Archives of the Russian Federation, Minatom RF and RFYaTs‐VNIIÉF [in Russian].

  2. 2. N. D. Bondarev, A. A. Keda, N. V. Selezneva, “Special File from the Archives of I. V. Kurchatov,” Voprosy Istorii Estestvoznaniya i Tekhniki [hereafter, VIET], No. 2 (1994).

  3. 3. Ya. P. Terletskii, “Operation Niels Bohr Interrogation,” VIET, No. 2 (1994).

  4. 4. Yu. N. Smirnov, “Niels Bohr Interrogation: Evidence from the Archives,” VIET, No. 2 (1994).

  5. 5. “Materials from the Foreign Intelligence Archives of Russia,” VIET, No. 3 (1992).

  6. 6. US Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Policy and Progress in the H‐Bomb Program: A Chronology of Leading Events, US Govt. Printing Office, Washington, DC (1953).

  7. 7. H. A. Bethe, “Observations on the Development of the H‐Bomb” (1954).
    [Printed with slight edits in Los Alamos Science, Fall 1982, p. 43].

  8. 8. H. F. York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco (1976).

  9. 9. C. Hansen, US Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History, Orion Books, New York (1988).

  10. 10. D. Hirsch, W. J. Mathews, “The H‐bomb: Who Really Gave Away the Secret?” Bull. At. Sci. 46, 22 (1990). https://doi.org/BASIAP
    Reprinted in: D. Hirsch, W. J. Mathews, Usp. Fiz. Nauk 161, 153 (1991); https://doi.org/UFNAAG
    D. Hirsch, W. J. Mathews, Sov. Phys. Usp. 34, 437 (1991).https://doi.org/SOPUAP

  11. 11. R. Serber, The Los Alamos Primer, U. Calif. P., Berkeley, Calif. (1992).

  12. 12. D. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, Yale U.P., New Haven, Conn. (1994).

  13. 13. S. M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician, U. Calif. P., Berkeley, Calif. (1991).
    [Reprinted from 1976 Scribner’s edition.].

  14. 14. R. Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Simon and Schuster, New York (1995).

More about the authors

German A. Goncharov, Russian Federal Nuclear Center—All‐Russian Scientific‐Research Institute of Experimental Physics (RFYaTs‐VNIIEF).

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Volume 49, Number 11

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