The explosion from the first "true" Soviet hydrogen bomb test in 1955. Year 1955 ( MCMLV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays the 1955 Gregorian calendar)

RDS-37 was the Soviet Union's first "true" (staged) hydrogen bomb, first tested on November 22, 1955. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR was a constitutionally Socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991 The Teller–Ulam design is a Nuclear weapon design which is used in Megaton -range Thermonuclear weapons and is more colloquially referred to as "the Events 498 - Kofi Aseidu- After the death of Anastasius II, Symmachus is elected Pope in the Lateran Year 1955 ( MCMLV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays the 1955 Gregorian calendar) The weapon had a nominal yield of approximately 3 megatons. The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is the amount of Energy, called the Yield, discharged when a Nuclear weapon is detonated expressed usually It was scaled down to 1. 6 megatons for the live test.

It was a multi-stage thermonuclear device which utilized radiation implosion called Sakharov's "Third Idea" in the USSR (the Teller–Ulam design in the USA). The term radiation implosion describes the process behind a class of devices which use high levels of Electromagnetic radiation to compress a target Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (Андре́й Дми́триевич Са́харов (May 21 1921 – December 14 1989 was an eminent Soviet nuclear Physicist The Teller–Ulam design is a Nuclear weapon design which is used in Megaton -range Thermonuclear weapons and is more colloquially referred to as "the It utilized a dry lithium deuteride fusion fuel, with some of it replaced with a "passive material" to reduce its total yield. Lithium hydride ( Li[[Hydride H]] is the compound of Lithium and hydrogen Despite this reduction in yield, because the weapon exploded under an inversion layer much of its shockwave was focused backward at the ground unexpectedly, causing a site building to collapse and kill three people. In meteorology an inversion is a deviation from the normal change of an atmospheric property with altitude

It was air-dropped at Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakhstan, making it the first air-dropped two-stage thermonuclear test. The Semipalatinsk Test Site (STS was the primary testing venue for the Soviet Union 's Nuclear weapons. The RDS-6s device (Joe-4) exploded in 1953 was labeled as a "hydrogen bomb" as well but was more similar to a "boosted" fission bomb than a megaton range hydrogen bomb. Joe 4 (Warhead name RDS-6s ( Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Stalina; Stalin's Reaction Engine was an American nickname for the first Soviet test of a Thermonuclear A boosted fission weapon usually refers to a type of Nuclear bomb that uses a small amount of fusion fuel to increase the rate and thus yield of a fission

See also

• RDS-1
• Soviet atomic bomb project
• Ivy Mike (first US hydrogen bomb)
• Castle Bravo (first US staged dry-fuel design)

References

• David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1995), ISBN 0-300-06664-3
• Alexei Kojevnikov, Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (Imperial College Press, 2004), ISBN 1-86094-420-5
• Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 1995), ISBN 0-684-80400-X

External links

• Soviet and Nuclear Weapons History
• Russia's Nuclear Weapons Program at the Atomic Forum