No bomb design has been as much maligned or otherwise disparaged as the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon. Detonated in August 1953, the bomb, officially tested under the name RDS-6s but usually known as Sloika or “layer cake” (the name Andrei Sakharov coined for it), was nothing to sneeze at. Shown in figure 1 and able to be dropped from aircraft, it released the explosive equivalent, or yield, of almost half a megaton of TNT. The result was a blazing fireball with 20 times the power of the bomb that leveled Nagasaki, Japan.
But when discussed today, the Sloika is almost immediately qualified by US experts as not a “true” hydrogen bomb. The downgrading is a curious reflex, one with interesting cultural and nationalistic origins. At one level, it is a technical determination: The bomb’s design did not allow it to be scaled up to near unlimited explosive yields that true...
