an American citizen, he joined the U.S. atomic bomb development project known as the Manhattan Project. For more than a decade he worked with the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University, at the University of Chicago, and at Los Aamos, New Mexico. He was the principal architect of inventing the hydrogen bomb, first tested in 1952(encarta pg 2), and strongly advocated that the United States continue the testing of thermonuclear weapons.
             Andrey Dmitryevich Sakgarov (1921-1989), nuclear physicist and father of the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb, was the son of a high school teacher and was born in Moscow. He received his degree in physics from Moscow State University in 1942, finishing his studies in Central Asia, where his department was evacuated during World War II. After working for three years in weapons plant, Sakharov studied theoretical physics under Igor Tamm at the P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, earning a doctorate in 1947. In 1948 Tamm drew him into the top-secret scientific and engineering team that Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin had assigned to develop thermonuclear weapons for the Soviet Union. Sakharov was Knowledgeable on gas dynamics, magnetic confinement of charged particles, and other problems. Sakharov played a crucial role to the creation of the Soviet hydrogen bomb first, which was tested in August 1953 (grolier pg 1).
             Robert J. Oppenheimer, (1904-1967), was a leader in developing the atomic bomb used in WW II. His prominent role as a government advisor on military weapons and policy in the postwar period made Oppenheimer one of the most influential American scientists of his day. After graduating from Harvard University (1925), he worked at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California institute of Technology (1929-1942). At both places he built large schools of theoretical physics from his following of...