Word: hydrogen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Andrei Sakharov, first revered in the U.S.S.R. as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, then reviled as a traitor for his tireless defense of human rights, recounts his tumultuous life. -- A look at Lavrenti Beria, a "terrifying human being." -- The Oppenheimer-Teller feud. -- The man who poisoned Soviet science. -- Why Sakharov ranks as a world-class scientist...
Just what made Andrei Sakharov tick? The Soviet Academy of Sciences' Brain Institute intends to find out. The mind that helped create the U.S.S.R.'s hydrogen bomb and spearheaded the Soviet dissident movement now lies cut into "blocks" and preserved in paraffin, awaiting examination by the institute's scientists...
...bespectacled German-born physicist named Klaus Fuchs walked into London's War Office and confessed to being a spy. For seven years, from 1942 to 1949, Fuchs had systematically funneled high-level secrets about U.S. and British nuclear-weapons research to the U.S.S.R., including plans for the yet unfinished hydrogen bomb...
...breakthrough idea was the recognition that the fuel would burn more efficiently if it was compressed before it was heated. According to Bethe, Ulam approached Teller with a two-stage H-bomb design that used the shock waves from an A-bomb to compact the hydrogen and ignite the H-bomb. Teller adapted Ulam's design, using the energy of the A-bomb's radiation rather than the force of its shock waves to achieve the necessary compression. It was a bomb of this design, code named Mike, that exploded on Nov. 1, 1952, on the Pacific island of Elugelab...