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 was determined to have it, and any American move toward abandoning it would have been interpreted as a sign of weakness or stupidity, and in any case the Soviet strategy would always have been the same: to produce the H-bomb as quickly as possible.”
