By Marisa De La Villa Before Andrei Sakharov became one of the Soviet Union’s most outspoken dissidents, he was celebrated as one of its greatest scientific minds. 1  In the early stages of the Cold War, he was devoted to the department of thermonuclear weapons, convinced that contributing to national defense was both a necessity and something quite patriotic . 2  Working within the research centers of the Soviet nuclear program, Sakharov helped shape the theories that made the USSR’s hydrogen bomb possible. This included working on the designs that would lead to the most terrifying weapon ever tested: the Tsar Bomba. 3 The Tsar Bomba was devised through what physicists described as a “layer cake” design, stacking fission and fusion stages in carefully arranged layers that amplified the explosion step by step. Like a tiered cake, each layer was dependent on the one beneath it, creating a cascading reaction that pushed the weapon’s destructive power to an unprecedented scale. 4...