President Truman decides to launch an all-out effort to develop a hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb. Bethe, Fermi, Teller, and von Neumann complete a lengthy feasibility study with unsuccessful results: the difficulties are insurmountable, but then an invention by Stan Ulam and Edward Teller in 1951 will change everything. The Soviets have been developing the H-bomb since at least 1948. According to the memoirs of Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-bomb and a future dissident, “Stalin is determined to have it, and any American move toward abandoning it would be interpreted as a sign of weakness or stupidity, and in any case the Soviet strategy would always be the same: to produce the H-bomb as quickly as possible.”
