He was a co-author of a detailed feasibility study undertaken by a team in 1954 and 1955 , involving the theory , design and calculations of the next-generation RDS-37 device , an air-delivered two-stage thermonuclear bomb which was detonated in 1956 : in the first stage , x-ray radiation was produced from a primary nuclear charge ; in the second stage the radiation compressed a thermonuclear core resulting in a fusion reaction . The development of this more-efficient and more-powerful Soviet thermonuclear weapon was galvanized by reports of American success with a high-yield device on 1 March 1954 , the first of the Castle Bravo tests . The design was what Sakharov referred to as " the third idea " which he 'd originally mulled over in 1949 ( the two-stage model was initiated by Stanislaw Ulam ; an original patent application for the invention was submitted by Klaus Fuchs and John von Neumann who were employed at Los Alamos in May 1946 ) . For this work , Goncharov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour in 1956 . In 1958 , his co-design of a further improved device was tested and then put into production . Between 1959 and 1961 , he developed original technical ideas , later credited to him as inventions , which were included in all further Soviet nuclear devices , and he co-designed and was involved in the testing several new bombs . He was involved in the design of the principal physical scheme of the RDS-220 bomb , ' Tsar Bomba ' , the largest-ever nuclear device . For his creative efforts in the work from 1959 , he received the Lenin Prize in 1962
Castle Bravo
Castle Bravo
German Goncharov