as desired. Design process Andrei Sakharov served as the leading theoretical contributor to the RDS-37 project, as he was the first to quantify the theoretical gains that could be had from a thermonuclear fuel. Sakharov developed his own compression method completely independent of the Teller-Ulam design. Sakharov's design for atomic compression utilized several tightly packed layers of either deuterium-deuterium or deuterium-tritium that would initiate inwardly, achieving an atomic compression. In theory, an atomic initiator would be positioned in the center of a spherical housing that was surrounded by layers of thermonuclear fuel and uranium. The entire system was to be compressed by an explosive placed all around the outside of the multi-layer sphere and initiate an implosion and ultimate initiation of the atomic initiator. The efficiency of this design earned Sakharov some prestige among his co-workers at Design Bureau 11. This design was referred to as the "Sloika" by Sakharov's co-workers as it resembled a traditional Russian, multi-layered cake that was tightly held together by a thick cream. The main problem with his idea was that the reaction cross sections of deuterium-deuterium and deuterium-tritium reactions were not known, and only theorized about. Design Bureau 11 (KB-11) presented the idea for the RDS-6 bomb design to USSR officials using primarily theoretical calculations. Andrei Sakharov published a paper in January 1949 where he noted that the deuterium – tritium and deuterium – deuterium reaction cross sections had not been studied experimentally and all assessments were conjectural. In March 1949 Khariton requested to Beria that Tamm and Kompaneets be given access to the intelligence data with the D–T cross-sections. This was refused to minimize the access to intelligence materials but instead on 27 April D–T cross-section measurements were sent to Tamm and Kompaneets without mentioning the origin. Ironically similar data was published in the Physical Review issue of 15 April 1949. With this information, Sakharov and Design Bureau 11 successfully implemented atomic compression in the RDS-6 tests. On 24 December 1954, the decision for implementation of the idea of atomic compression was green-lit by Soviet officials in a new project code named RDS-37. Test site preparations and other important test operations entered the preparation phase at the start of 1955. For RDS-37, a new design problem made itself known, keeping the distribution of charge from the spherical implosion symmetric. This led to the development of a canonical system in which both the primary