When was the first thermonuclear weapon developed?
Thermonuclear weapon
The first full-scale thermonuclear test was carried out by the United States in 1952; the concept has since been employed by most of the world's nuclear powers in the design of their weapons. The design of all modern thermonuclear weapons in the United States is known as the "Teller–Ulam configuration" for its two chief contributors, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, who developed it in 1951 for the United States, with certain concepts developed with the contribution of physicist John von Neumann. Similar devices were developed by the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, and China.
Project Grab Bag
The first nuclear detonation was an above-ground test, “Trinity”, conducted in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. It represented an important accomplishment of the Manhattan Project that had been initiated at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1943. In less than two months following this test, nuclear weapons assembled at Los Alamos were used in the Pacific War against Japan. Hiroshima was devastated on August 6, 1945 with a uranium-235 gun device with a fission product yield of about 15 kilotons. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, a plutonium-239 implosion device with a yield of about 22 kilotons was detonated over Nagasaki. These events significantly influenced the conclusion of World War II as the incredibly destructive power of these new weapons became apparent. The Manhattan Project brought together scientists from the US and Britain to collaborate on this nuclear weapons development program. Los Alamos was the epicenter of this activity, and, in spite of high-level security, it was realized in 1948 that security of the program had been breached. Klaus Fuchs, a British theoretical physicist intimately involved in some of the most sensitive aspects of the program, had supplied the USSR with key information via outside contacts beginning in 1945. This information substantially advanced the Soviet effort in developing nuclear weapons. As the US became aware of the loss of key ideas and design concepts, it was important to reassess the state of the Soviet program in fission devices, and to monitor extensions of their program to fusion devices. One concern was the extent of progress made by the Soviets in producing fissionable material through reactor operations. Of even greater importance was the state of development of fission-fusion devices capable of orders of magnitude greater destructive power than the fission devices used against Japan.