RDS-6s
| Joe-4 RDS-6s |
|
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Test site | Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakh SSR |
| Period | August 1953 |
| Number of tests | 1 |
| Test type | Atmospheric test |
| Device type | Fusion |
| Max. yield | Total yield 400 kilotons of TNT (1,700 TJ) |
| Navigation | |
| Previous test | RDS-3 |
| Next test | RDS-4 |
Joe 4 (warhead name: RDS-6s (Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Specialnyi; Special Jet Engine)) was an American nickname for the first Soviet test of a thermonuclear weapon on August 12, 1953, that detonated with a force equivalent to 400 kilotons of TNT.
Scholars dispute the authenticity of RDS-6 as a thermonuclear device as it did not manage to produce a yield consistent with a true hydrogen bomb. It utilized a scheme in which fission and fusion fuel (lithium-6 deuteride) were "layered", a design known as the Sloika (Russian: Слойка, named after a type of layered puff pastry) model in the Soviet Union. A ten-fold increase in explosive power was achieved by a combination of fusion energy and neutron-initiated ("boosted") fission. A similar design was earlier theorized by Edward Teller, but never tested, in the U.S. as the "Alarm Clock".
The Soviet thermonuclear weapons program initially researched two weapon designs. One design was the Sloika (RDS-6s), the other design was the Truba (Russian: Труба, pipe/cylinder) (RDS-6t). The RDS-6t was a two-stage gun-type bomb with a deuterium-tritium secondary and was similar to the U.S. “classical Super” design. When the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific in 1952 (Ivy Mike), higher priority was given to the RDS-6s design, which was considered to be more likely to work.
Andrei Sakharov's study group at the Theoretical Department of FIAN (the Physical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences) in 1948 came up with a second concept: adding a shell of natural, unenriched uranium around the deuterium would increase the deuterium concentration at the uranium-deuterium boundary and the overall yield of the device, because the natural uranium would capture neutrons and itself fission as part of the thermonuclear reaction. This idea of a layered fission-fusion-fission bomb led Sakharov to call it the sloika, or layer cake. This bomb was also known as the RDS-6s or Second Idea Bomb. This bomb led to the RDS-37.
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