How much did the American road to the H-bomb differ from the Soviet one?
A lot. It took one great leap to cross the chasm from nuke to thermonuke when Teller made his invention in 1951. Sakharov managed to do it in two smaller leaps: first, by inventing the “1st Idea” (= Sloyka) in 1948, then – in 1954 – by conceiving the 3rd Idea. It means that in Russia it was not exactly a chasm. Or, in other words, in 1951 Teller had to make a double invention. Since 1948 Sakharov dealt with compression, was thinking about atomic compression and was just to discover a proper tool radiation for proper compression. In both cases the development of the brilliant ideas required a great deal of creative effort in science and engineering by many people. It was The Work of Many People, as Teller titled his article of 1955, there were 31 names of scientists in the final Soviet report on the H-bomb in 1955. That is why the term father of H-bomb is not good enough. Grandfather is better, – it does not sound so dead serious, even if it is inapplicable to Teller and Sakharov.
