Sakharov is the creator of hydrogen. What was the creator of the hydrogen bomb Academician Sakharov

On January 16, 1963, Nikita Khrushchev announced the creation of a hydrogen bomb in the USSR. And this is another occasion to recall the scale of its devastating consequences and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.

On January 16, 1963, Nikita Khrushchev announced that a hydrogen bomb had been created in the USSR, after which nuclear tests were stopped. The Caribbean crisis of 1962 showed how fragile and defenseless the world can be against the backdrop of a nuclear threat, so in a senseless race to destroy each other, the USSR and the USA were able to reach a compromise and sign the first treaty that regulated the development of nuclear weapons, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. in the atmosphere, space and under water, to which many countries of the world subsequently joined.

In the USSR and the USA, nuclear weapons tests have been conducted since the mid-1940s. The theoretical possibility of obtaining energy by thermonuclear fusion was known even before the Second World War. It is also known that in Germany in 1944, work was underway to initiate thermonuclear fusion by compressing nuclear fuel using charges of conventional explosives, but they were unsuccessful because they failed to obtain the required temperatures and pressures.

Over the 15 years of testing nuclear weapons in the USSR and the USA, many discoveries were made in the field of chemistry and physics, which led to the production of two types of bombs - atomic and hydrogen. The principle of their work is slightly different: if the explosion of an atomic bomb leads to the decay of the nucleus, then the hydrogen bomb explodes due to the synthesis of elements with the release of an enormous amount of energy. It is this reaction that takes place in the interiors of stars, where, under the influence of ultrahigh temperatures and gigantic pressure, hydrogen nuclei collide and merge into heavier helium nuclei. The resulting amount of energy is enough to start a chain reaction involving all possible hydrogen. That is why the stars do not go out, and the explosion of a hydrogen bomb has such destructive power.

How it works?

Scientists copied this reaction using liquid isotopes of hydrogen - deuterium and tritium, which gave the name "hydrogen bomb". Subsequently, lithium-6 deuteride, a solid compound of deuterium and an isotope of lithium, was used, which, in its chemical properties, is an analogue of hydrogen. Thus, lithium-6 deuteride is a bomb fuel and, in fact, turns out to be more "clean" than uranium-235 or plutonium, which are used in atomic bombs and cause powerful radiation. However, in order for the hydrogen reaction itself to start, something must very strongly and dramatically increase the temperatures inside the projectile, for which a conventional nuclear charge is used. But the container for thermonuclear fuel is made from radioactive uranium-238, alternating it with layers of deuterium, which is why the first Soviet bombs of this type were called "layers". It is because of them that all living things, even at a distance of hundreds of kilometers from the explosion and surviving the explosion, can receive a dose of radiation that will lead to serious illness and death.

Why does the explosion form a "mushroom"?

In fact, a mushroom-shaped cloud is an ordinary physical phenomenon. Such clouds are formed during ordinary explosions of sufficient power, during volcanic eruptions, strong fires and meteorite falls. Hot air always rises above cold air, but here it heats up so quickly and so powerfully that it rises in a visible column, twists into an annular vortex and pulls a "leg" behind it - a column of dust and smoke from the surface of the earth. Rising, the air gradually cools, becoming like an ordinary cloud due to the condensation of water vapor. However, that's not all. Much more dangerous for humans shock wave, diverging along the surface of the earth from the epicenter of the explosion along a circle with a radius of up to 700 km, and radioactive fallout falling from that very mushroom cloud.

60 Soviet hydrogen bombs

Until 1963, more than 200 nuclear test explosions were carried out in the USSR, 60 of which were thermonuclear, that is, in this case, not an atomic bomb, but a hydrogen bomb exploded. Three or four experiments could be carried out at the test sites per day, during which the dynamics of the explosion, striking abilities, and potential damage to the enemy were studied.

The first prototype was blown up on August 27, 1949, and the last test of a nuclear weapon in the USSR was made on December 25, 1962. All tests took place mainly at two test sites - at the Semipalatinsk test site or "Siyap", located on the territory of Kazakhstan, and on Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.

August 12, 1953: The first test of the hydrogen bomb in the USSR

The first hydrogen explosion was carried out in the United States in 1952 on the Eniwetok Atoll. There they carried out an explosion of a charge with a capacity of 10.4 megatons, which was 450 times the power of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. However, it is impossible to call this device a bomb in the truest sense of the word. It was a three-story building filled with liquid deuterium.

But the first thermonuclear weapon in the USSR was tested in August 1953 at the Semipalatinsk test site. It was already a real bomb dropped from an airplane. The project was developed in 1949 (even before the first Soviet nuclear bomb was tested) by Andrei Sakharov and Yuli Khariton. The power of the explosion was equivalent to 400 kilotons, but studies have shown that the power could be increased to 750 kilotons, since only 20% of the fuel was used up in a thermonuclear reaction.

The most powerful bomb in the world

The most powerful explosion in history was initiated by a group of nuclear physicists led by Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences I.V. Kurchatov on October 30, 1961 at the Dry Nose training ground on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. The measured power of the explosion was 58.6 megatons, which was many times higher than all experimental explosions carried out on the territory of the USSR or the USA. It was originally planned that the bomb would be even larger and more powerful, but there was not a single aircraft that could lift more weight into the air.

The fireball of the explosion reached a radius of approximately 4.6 kilometers. Theoretically, it could grow to the surface of the earth, but this was prevented by a reflected shock wave, which lifted the bottom of the ball and threw it away from the surface. Nuclear mushroom explosion rose to a height of 67 kilometers (for comparison: modern passenger aircraft fly at an altitude of 8-11 kilometers). The appreciable wave of atmospheric pressure that arose as a result of the explosion circled the globe three times, spreading in just a few seconds, and the sound wave reached Dikson Island at a distance of about 800 kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion (the distance from Moscow to St. Petersburg). Everything at a distance of two or three kilometers was contaminated with radiation.

At the end of the 30s of the last century, the regularities of fission and decay were already discovered in Europe, and the hydrogen bomb turned from science fiction into reality. The history of the development of nuclear energy is interesting and still represents an exciting competition between the scientific potential of the countries: Nazi Germany, the USSR and the USA. The most powerful bomb that any state dreamed of owning was not only a weapon, but also a powerful political tool. The country that had it in its arsenal actually became omnipotent and could dictate its own rules.

The hydrogen bomb has its own history of creation, which is based on physical laws, namely the thermonuclear process. Initially, it was incorrectly called atomic, and illiteracy was to blame. In the scientist Bethe, who later became a Nobel Prize winner, worked on an artificial source of energy - the fission of uranium. This time was the peak of the scientific activity of many physicists, and among them there was such an opinion that scientific secrets should not exist at all, since initially the laws of science are international.

Theoretically, the hydrogen bomb had been invented, but now, with the help of designers, it had to acquire technical forms. It only remained to pack it in a certain shell and test it for power. There are two scientists whose names will forever be associated with the creation of this powerful weapon: in the USA it is Edward Teller, and in the USSR it is Andrey Sakharov.

In the United States, a physicist began to study the thermonuclear problem as early as 1942. By order of Harry Truman, then the President of the United States, the country's best scientists worked on this problem, they created a fundamentally new weapon of destruction. Moreover, the government's order was for a bomb with a capacity of at least a million tons of TNT. The hydrogen bomb was created by Teller and showed humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki its limitless, but destructive abilities.

A bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that weighed 4.5 tons and contained 100 kg of uranium. This explosion corresponded to almost 12,500 tons of TNT. The Japanese city of Nagasaki was destroyed by a plutonium bomb of the same mass, but equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT.

The future Soviet academician A. Sakharov in 1948, based on his research, presented the design of a hydrogen bomb under the name RDS-6. His research went along two branches: the first was called "puff" (RDS-6s), and its feature was an atomic charge, which was surrounded by layers of heavy and light elements. The second branch is the "pipe" or (RDS-6t), in which the plutonium bomb was in liquid deuterium. Subsequently, a very important discovery was made, which proved that the direction of the "pipe" is a dead end.

The principle of operation of a hydrogen bomb is as follows: first, a charge explodes inside the HB shell, which is the initiator of a thermonuclear reaction, as a result, a neutron flash occurs. In this process, the process is accompanied by the release of high temperature, which is needed for further neutrons begin bombarding the lithium deuteride insert, and it, in turn, under the direct action of neutrons, is split into two elements: tritium and helium. The used atomic fuse forms the components necessary for the synthesis to proceed in the already activated bomb. Here is such a difficult principle of operation of a hydrogen bomb. After this preliminary action, a thermonuclear reaction begins directly in a mixture of deuterium and tritium. At this time, the temperature in the bomb increases more and more, and more and more hydrogen is involved in the fusion. If you follow the time of these reactions, then the speed of their action can be characterized as instantaneous.

Subsequently, scientists began to use not the fusion of nuclei, but their fission. The fission of one ton of uranium creates energy equivalent to 18 Mt. This bomb has tremendous power. The most powerful bomb created by mankind belonged to the USSR. She even got into the Guinness Book of Records. Its blast wave was equal to 57 (approximately) megatons of TNT substance. It was blown up in 1961 in the area of ​​the Novaya Zemlya archipelago.

| 10/23/2014 at 01:08

Who actually created the hydrogen bomb instead of Sakharov.

Oleg Lavrentiev, creator of the hydrogen bomb

Oleg Lavrentiev was born in 1926 in Pskov and was probably a child prodigy. In any case, having read the book "Introduction to Nuclear Physics" in the 7th grade, he immediately caught fire with "the blue dream of working in the field of nuclear energy." But the war began. Oleg volunteered for the front. He met the victory in the Baltic states, but further studies again had to be postponed - the soldier had to continue military service in South Sakhalin, just liberated from the Japanese, in the small town of Poronaysk.

In the unit there was a library with technical literature and university textbooks, and Oleg, on his sergeant's allowance, subscribed to the journal "Advances in Physical Sciences".

The idea of ​​a hydrogen bomb and controlled thermonuclear fusion first came to him in 1948, when the command of the unit, which distinguished a capable sergeant, instructed him to prepare a lecture on the atomic problem for the personnel.

Having a few free days for preparation, I rethought all the accumulated material and found a solution to issues that I had been struggling with for more than one year, - says Oleg Aleksandrovich. - In 1949, in one year, I completed the 8th, 9th and 10th grades of the evening school for working youth and received a matriculation certificate. In January 1950, the American president, speaking before Congress, called on US scientists to complete work on the hydrogen bomb as soon as possible. And I knew how to make a bomb.

Having access only to a school textbook on physics, he alone, with the help of only his brains, did what huge teams of highly paid high-browed scientists struggled with, with unlimited means and opportunities on both sides of the ocean.

Having no contact with the scientific world, the soldier, in full agreement with the norms of life at that time, wrote a letter to Stalin. "I know the secret of the hydrogen bomb!" . And soon the command of the unit received an order from Moscow to create working conditions for Sergeant Lavrentiev. He was given a guarded room at the headquarters of the unit, where he wrote his first articles. In July 1950, he sent them by secret mail to the heavy engineering department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.

Lavrentiev described the principle of operation of a hydrogen bomb, where solid lithium deuteride was used as a fuel. This choice made it possible to make a compact charge - quite "on the shoulder" of the aircraft. Note that the first American hydrogen bomb "Mike", tested two years later, in 1952, contained liquid deuterium as a fuel, was as high as a house and weighed 82 tons.

The main question was how to isolate the ionized gas heated to hundreds of millions of degrees, that is, the plasma, from the cold walls of the reactor. No material can withstand such heat. The sergeant proposed a revolutionary solution at that time - a force field could act as a shell for high-temperature plasma. The first option is electric.

He did not know that his message was very quickly sent for review to the then Candidate of Sciences, and later Academician and three times Hero of Socialist Labor A. Sakharov, who already in August commented on the idea of ​​controlled thermonuclear fusion: “... I believe that the author puts a very an important and not hopeless problem... I consider it necessary to discuss in detail the draft of Comrade. Lavrentiev. Regardless of the results of the discussion, it is necessary to note the creative initiative of the author right now.”

On March 5, 1953, Stalin dies, on June 26, Beria is arrested and soon shot, and on August 12, 1953, a thermonuclear charge using lithium deuteride is successfully tested in the USSR. Participants in the creation of new weapons receive state awards, titles and prizes, but Lavrentiev, for a reason completely incomprehensible to him, loses a lot overnight.

At the university, they not only stopped giving me an increased scholarship, but also “turned out” the tuition fee for the past year, in fact, leaving me without a livelihood, - says Oleg Aleksandrovich. - I made my way to an appointment with the new dean and, in complete confusion, I heard: “Your benefactor has died. What do you want?"

At the same time, in LIPAN (the only place in the country where controlled thermonuclear fusion was then practiced), my admission was withdrawn, and I lost my permanent pass to the laboratory, where, according to an earlier agreement, I had to undergo undergraduate practice, and subsequently work. If the scholarship was later restored, then I never received admission to the institute.
In other words, they were simply removed from the secret fiefdom. Pushed back, fenced off from him with secrecy. Naive Russian scientist! He could not even imagine that this could be so.

In the spring of 1956, a young specialist arrived in Kharkov with a report on the theory of electromagnetic traps, which he wanted to show to the director of the institute, K. Sinelnikov. Oleg did not know that even before his arrival in Kharkov, Kirill Dmitrievich had already been called by one of the LIPANites, warning that a “scandalist” and “author of confused ideas” were coming to see him. They also called the head of the theoretical department of the institute, Alexander Akhiezer, recommending that Lavrentiev’s work be “hacked to death”. But Kharkiv residents were in no hurry with their assessments. The influence of the powerful Moscow-Arzamas scientific clique could not spread over one and a half thousand kilometers. However, they took an active part - they called, spread rumors, discredited the scientist. How to protect your feeder!
Application for opening
Oleg Alexandrovich found out by chance that he was the first to propose to hold the plasma by the field, having stumbled in 1968 (! 15 years later) in one of the books on the memoirs of I. Tamm (Head Sakharov). His last name was not there, only an indistinct phrase about "one military man from the Far East",

The cat smells, (Tamm) whose meat she ate! Tamm and Sakharov understood perfectly well what was happening. What Lavrentiev came up with is the key that opens access to putting the hydrogen bomb into practice. Everything else, the whole theory, has long been known to absolutely everyone, since it was described even in ordinary textbooks. And not only the "brilliant" Sakharov could bring the idea to a material embodiment, but also any techie who has unlimited access to material state resources.

Sakharov became famous for the fact that, under the influence of his beloved wife and her puppeteers, he began to actively destroy the Empire that had nurtured him with his "human rights" activities. the great "humanist" Sakharov at one time suggested to the US president in ~ 1970 (who was then, Nixon, sort of?) to launch a preventive nuclear strike on the USSR because he ... interferes with emigration from the "damned scoop". A. Sakharov, having waited for Gorbachev's "pegestgoyka", treacherously called from high tribunes to break the USSR into 30-40 "small, but civilized" states. It was then that human rights activists created the myth of the "father of the hydrogen bomb."

It's one thing when a well-known human rights activist and dissident is just an unsuccessful scientist who can only "develop creatively." And it is a completely different matter when the “father of the hydrogen bomb” becomes the “father of Russian democracy”.
And the scientific merits of Sakharov, human rights activists, at the suggestion of overseas masters of psychological warfare, began to artificially inflate, like a frog through a straw.

On August 12, 1953, at 7:30 am, the first Soviet hydrogen bomb was tested at the Semipalatinsk test site, which had the service name "Product RDS‑6c". It was the fourth Soviet test of a nuclear weapon.

The beginning of the first work on the thermonuclear program in the USSR dates back to 1945. Then information was received about the research being conducted in the United States on the thermonuclear problem. They were initiated by the American physicist Edward Teller in 1942. Teller's concept of thermonuclear weapons was taken as the basis, which received the name "pipe" in the circles of Soviet nuclear scientists - a cylindrical container with liquid deuterium, which was supposed to be heated by the explosion of an initiating device such as a conventional atomic bomb. Only in 1950, the Americans found that the "pipe" was unpromising, and they continued to develop other designs. But by this time, Soviet physicists had already independently developed another concept of thermonuclear weapons, which soon - in 1953 - led to success.

Andrei Sakharov came up with an alternative scheme for the hydrogen bomb. The bomb was based on the idea of ​​"puff" and the use of lithium-6 deuteride. Developed in KB-11 (today it is the city of Sarov, former Arzamas-16, Nizhny Novgorod region), the RDS-6s thermonuclear charge was a spherical system of layers of uranium and thermonuclear fuel surrounded by a chemical explosive.

To increase the energy release of the charge, tritium was used in its design. The main task in creating such a weapon was to use the energy released during the explosion of an atomic bomb to heat and set fire to heavy hydrogen - deuterium, to carry out thermonuclear reactions with the release of energy that can support themselves. To increase the proportion of "burnt" deuterium, Sakharov proposed to surround the deuterium with a shell of ordinary natural uranium, which was supposed to slow down the expansion and, most importantly, significantly increase the density of deuterium. The phenomenon of ionization compression of thermonuclear fuel, which became the basis of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb, is still called "saccharization".

According to the results of work on the first hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor and laureate of the Stalin Prize.

"Product RDS-6s" was made in the form of a transportable bomb weighing 7 tons, which was placed in the bomb hatch of the Tu-16 bomber. For comparison, the bomb created by the Americans weighed 54 tons and was the size of a three-story house.

To assess the destructive effects of the new bomb, a city was built at the Semipalatinsk test site from industrial and administrative buildings. In total, there were 190 different structures on the field. In this test, for the first time, vacuum intakes of radiochemical samples were used, which automatically opened under the action of a shock wave. In total, 500 different measuring, recording and filming devices installed in underground casemates and solid ground structures were prepared for testing the RDS-6s. Aviation and technical support of tests - measurement of the pressure of the shock wave on the aircraft in the air at the time of the explosion of the product, air sampling from the radioactive cloud, aerial photography of the area was carried out by a special flight unit. The bomb was detonated remotely, by giving a signal from the remote control, which was located in the bunker.

It was decided to make an explosion on a steel tower 40 meters high, the charge was located at a height of 30 meters. The radioactive soil from previous tests was removed to a safe distance, special structures were rebuilt in their own places on old foundations, a bunker was built 5 meters from the tower to install equipment developed at the Institute of Chemical Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which registers thermonuclear processes.

Military equipment of all types of troops was installed on the field. During the tests, all experimental structures within a radius of up to four kilometers were destroyed. The explosion of a hydrogen bomb could completely destroy a city 8 kilometers across. The environmental consequences of the explosion were horrendous: the first explosion accounted for 82% of strontium-90 and 75% of caesium-137.

The power of the bomb reached 400 kilotons, 20 times more than the first atomic bombs in the USA and the USSR.

The work on the creation of the hydrogen bomb was the world's first intellectual "battle of wits" on a truly global scale. The creation of the hydrogen bomb initiated the emergence of completely new scientific areas - the physics of high-temperature plasma, the physics of ultrahigh energy densities, and the physics of anomalous pressures. For the first time in the history of mankind, mathematical modeling was used on a large scale.

Work on the "RDS-6s product" created a scientific and technical reserve, which was then used in the development of an incomparably more advanced hydrogen bomb of a fundamentally new type - a hydrogen bomb of a two-stage design.

The Sakharov-designed hydrogen bomb not only became a serious counterargument in the political confrontation between the USA and the USSR, but also caused the rapid development of Soviet cosmonautics in those years. It was after successful nuclear tests that OKB Korolev received an important government task to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile to deliver the created charge to the target. Subsequently, the rocket, called the "seven", launched the first artificial satellite of the Earth into space, and it was on it that the first cosmonaut of the planet, Yuri Gagarin, launched.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources

HELL. Sakharov“... armed our country with the most powerful weapon in history, which made the Soviet Union one of the two superpowers. Academician Sakharov alone did more for the country than the whole army of Chekists and Tsekists who persecuted him for many years and shortened his life.

For many years there has been a debate: to whom do we owe the hydrogen bomb? Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov? Or is it still Soviet intelligence, which has been stealing American atomic secrets for years?

The first to speak about the possibility of creating thermonuclear weapons back in 1942 was the Nobel laureate who fled from fascist Italy to America. Enrico Fermi. He shared his idea with the person who was destined to bring it to life, an American Edward Teller. And the German communist physicist Klaus Fuchs, who was an agent of Soviet intelligence, worked in Teller's scientific group.

Information about Teller's work also came to Moscow. The study of these materials was entrusted Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, future academician and three times Hero of Socialist Labor.

What is the principle of operation of thermonuclear weapons?

Atomic energy is released during the decay of the constituent parts of the atomic nucleus. To do this, plutonium was given the shape of a ball and surrounded by chemical explosives, which were detonated simultaneously at thirty-two points. The synchronized explosion instantly squeezed nuclear materials, and a chain reaction of the decay of atomic nuclei began. The basis of a thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb is the reverse process - fusion, the formation of nuclei of heavy elements by fusion of nuclei of lighter elements. In this case, an incomparably large amount of energy is released. Such synthesis occurs on the Sun - however, at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees. The main problem was how to replicate such conditions on Earth. Edward Teller He was the first to think that the energy of an atomic explosion could be used as a fuse for a hydrogen bomb. The gigantic temperatures that occur during thermonuclear reactions excluded the possibility of an experiment. It was a job for mathematicians. In the United States, the first computers were already in full use. In Soviet Union cybernetics was recognized as a bourgeois pseudoscience Therefore, all calculations were made on paper. Almost all Soviet mathematicians were occupied with this work.

Calculations showed Zeldovich that the proposed Edward Teller H-bomb design doesn't work: not it was possible to create such a temperature and compress hydrogen isotopes in such a way that a spontaneous fusion reaction began. On this work could well stop. Moreover, Klaus Fuchs has already been arrested for espionage, and Moscow has lost information about what is happening with the Americans. But then a young physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was sent to Arzamas-16. He solved this problem. Such insights happen only to geniuses and only at a young age. Moreover, Sakharov did not want to engage in nuclear weapons. He was only interested in theoretical physics. Andrey Sakharov with the help of the future academician Vitaly Ginzburg came up with a different design of the hydrogen bomb, which went down in the history of science as a "spherical puff". For Sakharov, the hydrogen isotope was located not separately, but in layers inside the plutonium charge. Therefore, a nuclear explosion made it possible to reach both the temperature and pressure necessary for a thermonuclear reaction to begin.

The hydrogen bomb was tested in August 1953.

The explosion turned out to be much stronger than an atomic one. The impression was terrible, the destruction monstrous. But Sakharov's puff was limited in power. Therefore, soon Sakharov and Zeldovich came up with a new bomb. It was built on the same principle that, having made sure of his initial mistake, the American Edward Teller went.

Andrei Sakharov armed our country with the most destructive weapons in human history. The Soviet Union became a superpower, and a balance of fear was established in the world that saved us from World War III.

For his services, Sakharov was elected to the Academy of Sciences. He received three stars of the Hero of Socialist Labor, the Stalin and Lenin Prizes - according to a closed list, of course. Twice the hero was supposed to erect a monument in his homeland, three times the hero - also in Moscow, but his very name was a big secret. He worked on the creation of hydrogen weapons as long as there were tasks in this area for a physicist of his level. But when these tasks were solved and the work of the technological level remained, his genius brain turned to other problems.

After the creation of hydrogen weapons, Academician Sakharov found himself in a narrow circle of the most valuable scientists for the state. These names were very few - Kurchatov, Khariton, Keldysh, Korolev... For these people, the state provided a fabulous life for those times, creating all the conditions for fruitful work. The highest officials of the state were polite, kind and helpful with them. They could easily call Khrushchev, and then Brezhnev and knew that they would be listened to attentively, that they would be heeded.