“The motivation for the Tsar Bomba test is best understood in the context of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry at the time. This would become known in the West as the Tsar Bomba, the Tsar’s Bomb. With the Cold War with the United States heating up, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev turned to Sakharov to come up with the world’s most powerful bomb ever. Ultimately, the Soviets would test 80 bombs, 36 in 1958 alone. On August 29, 1949, the Soviets had tested their first nuclear device - known as "Joe-1" in the West - on the remote steppes on what is now Kazakhstan. The breakthrough would allow the Soviet Union to build its first hydrogen bomb, a device much more powerful that the atomic weapons of only a few years before. I had no real choice in the matter, but the concentration, total absorption, and energy that I brought to the task were my own."Ī few months later, the young physics graduate student developed a totally new idea for an H-bomb design, one that he would call the sloika, or layer cake. Later he wrote: "No one asked whether or not I wanted to take part in such work. Sakharov was himself recruited to work on the Soviet nuclear weapons program in June 1948 by his professor, Igor Tamm. Something new and terrible had entered our lives, a product of the greatest of the sciences, of the discipline I revered." Sakharov And His 'Layer Cake' There could be no doubt that my fate and the fate of many others, perhaps of the entire world, had changed overnight. I was so stunned that my knees practically buckled. "On my way to the bakery, I stopped to glance at a newspaper and discovered President Truman's announcement. ![]() But he said his interest was truly sparked when he heard of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945: In his memoirs, Sakharov recounted first hearing of nuclear fission just before the war from his father, himself a physics teacher, who had attended a lecture on the subject. He was an integral part of the Soviet nuclear weapons program and is even called the “father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb.” The citation called him "the conscience of mankind," saying that he "has fought not only against the abuse of power and violations of human dignity in all its forms, but has in equal vigor fought for the ideal of a state founded on the principle of justice for all."īut Sakharov was by training and vocation a nuclear physicist.
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