Who invented hydrogen bomb?

Answer 1

There are a few who claim the idea, but president Harry Truman first approved one to be built for the Korean War, 1950-1953. Richard Lawrence Garwin, American physicist, produced a design in 1952 at IBM Watson Laboratory at Columbia University.

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The original ideas for the hydrogen bomb came up early in the Manhattan Project, but it is unknown who first proposed them.

Edward Teller became fixated on the idea of the hydrogen bomb and the only way that Oppenheimer could get Teller to continue doing any work on the atomic bomb and stop taking other scientists away from their critical atomic bomb tasks to work on Teller's hydrogen bomb ideas was to just let him work on his hydrogen bomb ideas and just contact Teller as needed to consult on the atomic bomb work.

Edward Teller completed his first hydrogen bomb design, which he called "The Super" in the fall of 1945. This design was tested by numerical simulation on the newly completed ENIAC in december 1945 through january 1946, and shown to be not workable. Further work on hydrogen bomb designs was effectively suspended (although Edward Teller was allowed to continue "dabbling" at designing one).

In 1950 Stanislaw Ulam (a mathematician working with a team on producing higher yield more efficient atomic bombs) went to consult with Teller on an idea his team had proposed to use the explosion of one atomic bomb to compress and trigger a second atomic bomb. Teller suddenly realized this was the idea he needed to make his "Super" bombs work: use an atomic bomb not just to heat his hydrogen bomb (as he had done in all earlier designs) but to compress his hydrogen bomb too. Computer numerical simulations confirmed this would work. Serious design work on hydrogen bombs resumed at Los Alamos.

The first hydrogen bomb using the new "Teller-Ulam" design was built and tested in 1952, but by then Teller was fed up with his working arrangements at Los Alamos and quit. He convinced the military and AEC that they needed a second nuclear weapons development lab that he would have absolute control over. Slightly later in 1952 Lawrence Livermore Labs opened with Edward Teller as director.

Answer 2

Dick Garwin