who designed the staged radiation implosion model of the hydrogen bomb
Radiation implosion Radiation implosion was first developed by Klaus Fuchs and John von Neumann in the United States, as part of their work on the original "Classical Super" hydrogen bomb design. Their work resulted in a secret patent filed in 1946, and later given to the USSR by Fuchs as part of his nuclear espionage. However, their scheme was not the same as used in the final hydrogen bomb design, and neither the American nor the Soviet programs were able to make use of it directly in developing the hydrogen bomb (its value would become apparent only after the fact). A modified version of the Fuchs-von Neumann scheme was incorporated into the "George" shot of Operation Greenhouse.[1]
History of nuclear weapons In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and it quickly became unsafe for Jewish scientists to remain in the country. Leó Szilárd fled to London where he proposed, and in 1934 patented, the idea of a nuclear chain reaction via neutrons. The patent also introduced the term critical mass to describe the minimum amount of material required to sustain the chain reaction and its potential to cause an explosion. (British patent 630,726.) He subsequently assigned the patent to the British Admiralty so that it could be covered by the Official Secrets Act.[2] In a very real sense, Szilárd was the father of the atomic bomb academically. Also in 1934, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered that artificial radioactivity could be induced in stable elements by bombarding them with alpha particles; Enrico Fermi reported similar results when bombarding uranium with neutrons.