In 1950, U.S. President Harry Truman announced he had ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb.

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The computer helped crunch some of the numbers needed to build the first hydrogen bomb.

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In 1958 Edward Teller, a creator of the hydrogen bomb, suggested using nuclear explosions to dig a harbor near Cape Thompson, Alaska.

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Kennan, whose writings gave birth to the theory of nuclear deterrence, argued passionately but futilely against the development of the hydrogen bomb.

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And the perfectly sensible reason why it didn't, he added, was the old Maxim-gun jingle: the Russians have got the hydrogen bomb and the Serbs have not.

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After the unmasking of Fuchs through the Venona decrypts, Moscow planned to impede the development of a Western hydrogen bomb by casting doubt on the loyalty of key scientists.

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In 1967, China exploded its first hydrogen bomb.

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After the Soviet Union broke America's atomic monopoly in 1949, several prominent scientists and politicians favoured the development of the hydrogen bomb, a fusion weapon hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs that the Manhattan Project had built.

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Acting alone, gravity would cause stars to collapse completely, but as long as energy is produced at their centers by nuclear fusion (the joining of atomic nuclei to form new elements, as in a hydrogen bomb), the star is heated and puffed up.

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