RDS-6s

'special jet engine'; American codename: Joe 4) was the first Soviet attempted test of a thermonuclear weapon that occurred on August 12, 1953, that detonated with an energy equivalent to 400 kilotons of TNT.

[2] The assumption was that the deuterium tritium mixture could be easily heated and compressed, and the shock would start the thermonuclear reaction prematurely.

In April 1949 the group received D + T cross section data obtained from intelligence gathering without mentioning the source.

[5] After the United States tested Ivy Mike in November 1952, Lavrentiy Beria sent a memo to spare no effort on the development of the RDS-6s.

[13] Despite the inability of the RDS-6s to be scaled into the megaton range, the detonation was still used by Soviet diplomats as leverage.

The Soviets claimed that they too had a hydrogen bomb, but unlike the United States' first thermonuclear device, theirs was deployable by air.

[14] The United States didn't develop a deployable version of the hydrogen bomb until five months after the RDS-6s test, in 1954.

[citation needed][A 1] The first Soviet test of a "true" hydrogen bomb was on November 22, 1955, under the directive of Nikolai Bulganin (influenced by Nikita Khrushchev), code-named RDS-37.