On January 31, 1950, President Harry Truman signed an order to create a hydrogen bomb. Less than two years later, on November 1, 1952, the United States first tested a multi-stage hydrogen bomb, primarily designed by Edward Taylor. On August 20, 1953, the USSR announced the successful testing of its hydrogen bomb, and thus began the thermonuclear race.
The first experimental nuclear fusion reaction was carried out in 1934 by Rutherford, Oliphant and Harteck when bombarding deuterium with deuterium, resulting in a helium nucleus.
In May 1941, in a lecture at Kyoto University, the Japanese physicist Tokugaro Hagiwara suggested the possibility of carrying out a thermonuclear reaction between hydrogen nuclei using an explosive chain reaction from the fission of the uranium-235 nucleus. In September of this year, at Columbia University, a similar idea - initiating a thermonuclear reaction in a deuterium environment through an atomic explosion - was also expressed by Enrico Fermi to Edward Taylor. It was this discussion that marked the beginning of Taylor's unstoppable activity for the creation of a thermonuclear bomb.
And already in the summer of 1942, when plans for the construction of the Los Alamos Laboratory and the creation of the atomic bomb were being discussed in Berkeley, Taylor also presented the main considerations for the possibility of creating a thermonuclear superbomb. This concept was based on the idea of the possibility that the flow of neutrons emitted by the primary uranium bomb, detonated by the "counter-cannon shot" method, could cause a nuclear detonation in a cylinder filled with liquid deuterium.
At the end of August 1946, Taylor proposed a new scheme for a thermonuclear explosion - an alternative to the "classic super", which he called the "alarm clock". The new structure consists of arranged spherical layers of fissile materials and thermonuclear fuel (deuterium, tritium and/or their chemical compounds), in which, after the initiation of the explosion, the fast neutrons produced during the thermonuclear processes should lead to a noticeable increase in the energy release in the neighboring fissile materials. In turn, as a result of the ionization contraction of the thermonuclear fuel, its density should increase greatly and the rate of thermonuclear reactions should sharply increase.
By multiplying the process, layer by layer, such a structure allows for the achievement of megaton explosive powers. Despite the great potential prospects of the “alarm clock”, due to problems with initiating the primary ignition, which required a lot of power, this project remained a theoretical possibility without any significant progress.
On January 31, 1950, US President Harry Truman issued an official statement in which he announced that he had instructed the Atomic Energy Commission “to continue work on all types of nuclear weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb”. In practice, American scientists had advanced enough on the path to its realization to be able to plan for 1951 the conduct of explosive range experiments.
One of them, under the name “Point”, represented the testing of the so-called “boosted atomic bomb”, and the other - under the name “George” - is a test of a model of the “classical super” with binary induction ignition, operating on the principle of radiation implosion.
In 1951, Stanislav Ulam proposed a two-stage thermonuclear bomb using neutrons to cause implosion in the second. Events developed at “thermonuclear” speed. A month later, in April 1951, Frederic de Hofmann proposed an improved version: an initiator of actively fissile material placed in the secondary assembly of thermonuclear fuel. On May 8 of this year. the first test of “George” was also carried out.
In early June, Teller and Ulam came up with the idea of increasing the efficiency of the thermonuclear explosion by using lithium-6 deuteride, which would greatly increase the yield of tritium and thus significantly increase the efficiency of the thermonuclear fuel.
Meanwhile, at a conference in Princeton on the problems of the superbomb, the idea was approved and a decision was made on the need to produce this substance. But since at that time its large-scale production was not organized in the USA, it was decided to base the preparation of the first hydrogen bomb on the improved technique of chemical implosion of the atomic uranium bomb (the “Alarm Clock” project), the development of which had not stopped since the beginning of 1950.
The first hydrogen bomb with a power of several kilotons of TNT equivalent was tested on November 16, 1952. But since this scheme did not allow increasing its power above 1 Mt, Los Alamos returned to the idea of using Li-6 and began construction of a plant for this purpose in Oak Ridge, which was put into operation in mid-1953, and it would provide the necessary amount of thermonuclear fuel only in the fall of 1954.
On November 1, 1952, the first bomb releasing energy from the fusion of light elements was detonated on Eniwetok Atoll - a hydrogen bomb with a power of 10 megatons of TNT. The bomb was three-stage. The first stage was an atomic bomb with a power of 50 kilotons, the second stage was from the fusion of deuterium and tritium by radiation implosion, the power of the second stage was 2.5 megatons. The third stage is uranium-238 fissioned by fast neutrons emitted during the fusion of deuterium and tritium. The energy of the third stage is 7.5 megatons, Darik recalls.
As a result, one of the islands of the atoll - Elugelab, ceases to exist: the crater is about 80 m deep, the diameter is about 3 km. This bomb is not yet "combat" - the device is as high as a three-story house and in fact represents an atomic bomb plus a huge hydrogen liquefier.
Truman's statement of January 31, 1950 seriously worried the Soviet leadership. After November 1, 1952, when the United States conducted the second test "Mike" (a real thermonuclear explosion with a power of 10.4 Mt), the Soviet leadership harnessed all the resources of the state to break the thermonuclear monopoly of the United States.
The most powerful such bomb was the 58-megaton "Tsar Bomba", detonated on October 30, 1961 in the Soviet islands of Novaya Zemlya. Initially, an explosion with a power of 100 megatons of TNT was planned, but it was later reduced to 60 megatons (by replacing the uranium shell of the bomb with lead), due to the extremely high radioactive contamination that would result from using uranium. The bomb was about 1,500 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Its cloud reached a height of 67 km, literally blowing away the rain clouds. Seismologists around the world detected an earthquake that circled the planet 3 times before dying down. The bomb was dropped from an airplane and exploded about 4 km above the earth's surface.