Word: bombe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Russians are producing plutonium, they have really learned the atomic trade, perhaps with the help of German scientists. Once they accumulated enough fissionable material (U-235 or plutonium), it should not have been hard to make an atomic bomb. In quantities below a certain amount (the "critical mass," sometimes estimated at around 26 lbs.), neither material will explode. But when two such masses are brought together, forming more than a "critical mass," they explode spontaneously...
...Poor Bombs Are Easy. The trick is to bring them together quickly enough. If they approach one another slowly, they begin to react before they are fully in contact. The heat developed drives them apart prematurely, and the reaction stops. In the bomb described in the Smyth Report, the masses were driven together, probably in millionths of a second, by some such "low-order explosive" as TNT. Even if the Russians did not do as well as U.S. scientists, their less efficient bomb would still produce an "atomic explosion...
...scientist is inclined to minimize the Russian scientific achievement. It is possible that the Russians have built by persistence and enormous effort a single rather poor bomb. But they have world-renowned physicists, such as Peter Kapitza, and probably many other first-rate men. So it is also quite possible that they have large, fairly efficient plants capable of producing many excellent bombs...
...Russians wished to keep their bomb from sending up telltale dust, they could have exploded it deep in some Siberian lake. The second Bikini test bomb (Test Baker), which exploded underwater, did not raise much of a cloud. Most of its dust was carried back into the lagoon by a deluge of radioactive water...
Earth Waves. But underwater bombs and bombs exploded on a tower above ground smack the earth hard, as high airbursts do not. Seismic (earthquake) waves, shooting off in all directions, can be picked up at tremendous distances. Earth waves from Test Baker were detected by many seismographs on the U.S. Pacific coast, 4,300 miles away. Even the Alamogordo bomb, exploded on a loo-ft. tower, sent out earth waves that were picked up at Tinemaha, Calif., 710 miles away. Specially sensitive seismographs, ringed around the U.S.S.R., could pick up earth waves from a bomb exploded underwater or reasonably near...