Building the H Bomb

The Table of Contents for the book is as follows:

• Preface
• A Note on Secrecy
• Prologue
• The Big Idea
• The Protagonists
• The Choice
• The Scientists, the Officials, and the President
• Nuclear Energy
• Some Physics
• Going West
• A New World
• The Classical Super
• Calculating and Testing
• Constructing Matterhorn
• Academia Cowers
• New Mexico, New York, and New Jersey
• The Garwin Design
• Climbing Matterhorn
• More Than a Boy
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• End Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• A Note on Secrecy
• Prologue

On March 9, 1951, Edward Teller and Stan Ulam issued a report, LAMS 1225, at the Los Alamos Scientific Lab where they both worked at the time. It bore the ponderous, hardly illuminating title “On Heterocatalytic Detonation I. Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors,” and it changed everything. Since it dealt with thermonuclear weapons (H bombs), it was, of course, classified secret. For some reason, it remains secret to this day. The highly redacted version of it that can be found on the Web is mostly white space. Nevertheless, most of what was in it is well known…

Both Teller and Ulam later wrote and spoke (including to me) about their February 1951 meeting and about the genesis of the idea of radiation implosion. Teller consistently claimed sole credit for the breakthrough idea—although his statements about the time when this happened vary. He gives Ulam credit only for earlier calculations showing that the classical Super was unlikely to work. Ulam's contribution, he said, was forcing new thinking about how to make an H bomb…

When I entered Princeton's graduate program in physics in the fall of 1948, the remotest thing from my thoughts was that two years later I might find myself in New Mexico working on the hydrogen bomb…

On October 28–30, 1949, just five weeks after President Truman's announcement of the Soviet atomic bomb test, the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission met in Washington, in part to address the question of whether to “pursue with high priority the development of the super bomb.” It is difficult to imagine a committee containing a higher percentage of distinguished physical scientists and scientists with links to the Manhattan Project than this one, yet, as it turned out, the recommendations the committee reached after more than two days of intense discussion had no discernable effect on the prosecution of weapons design work…

When Henri Becquerel, in Paris, discovered radioactivity in 1896, my parents were pre-schoolers. I mention this fact only to emphasize that the history of nuclear energy from Becquerel to bombs, from a few relatively harmless alpha, beta, and gamma rays to the destruction of cities and the obliteration of a Pacific island was accomplished in one human lifetime. In 1952, the year in which “Mike” released its ten megatons and Elugelab was no more, my parents turned sixty…

Here is some physics related to thermonuclear weapons, for those who want to read it…

I spent most of my boyhood in Kentucky, and, when I was eight and nine, lived for one year in Georgia. In 1942, at sixteen, armed with a “regional scholarship” from Phillips Exeter Academy, I was off to New Hampshire for the final two years of high school. All of Exeter's students at that time were boys, and almost all of them were from New York and New England. My role, as a southerner, was to leaven the mix. I suppose I did that to some extent. The educational benefit to me was enormous. Before I left Exeter, I knew that I wanted to be a physicist. Going on to Harvard and Princeton seemed more like following a natural course of events than choosing a path…

Within days of joining the Los Alamos lab, I was confronted with yet another decision, this one more confounding than the decision whether I should be there at all. All of the lab's three thousand or so employees were presented with a loyalty oath to sign. We were employees of the University of California, and this oath was the same as the version that all UC staff were being required to sign at their respective campuses in California as of July 1, 1950. The oath had two parts, brief enough to be duplicated in full here…

According to Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans in their album “Space Songs,” The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas, A gigantic nuclear furnace…

In the nine months or so between the Ulam-Everett-Fermi-Planck gloom and the Teller-Ulam rosy dawn, how did we occupy ourselves?

When John Wheeler interrupted his stay in Paris to join the H-bomb effort at Los Alamos in early 1950, he imagined that he might need to remain at the Los Alamos lab for up to two or two-and-a-half years. There was, at the time, no clear path to success on the bomb—just the likelihood of a lot of hard work to bludgeon nature into submission…

Among the people caught up in HUAC's net was David Bohm, an assistant professor of physics at Princeton. (Another was J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank—also a physicist—who, after being forced out of a professorship at the University of Minnesota, became a cattle rancher and high-school teacher in Colorado, and later, to the benefit of millions, director of San Francisco's Exploratorium.) I discuss Bohm here because his case had some influence on Princeton's faculty, pro and con, and thus some bearing on Princeton's receptivity to Wheeler's proposal. Also I had a personal link to Bohm. He was co-author of my first published paper and was, for a time, my roommate…

Simplicity marked Matterhorn's beginnings. For office space we were assigned a metal shack that had held experimental animals for the Rockefeller Institute, and the aroma lingered. For the first week that we were there, John Wheeler, John Toll, and I slept on cots in a cavernous boiler room of the former Institute. Wheeler was waiting for tenants to vacate his Battle Road house. Toll and I were looking for places to live in town. Fortunately, the boiler room's amenities included a bathroom and shower facilities…

An important meeting of an advisory panel convened by the Atomic Energy Commission was scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, June 16 and 17, 1951, and was to be held at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, fortuitously soon after Matterhorn got going. It was a truly “blue-ribbon” panel, attended by all five Atomic Energy Commissioners; Robert Oppenheimer and four other members of the General Advisory Committee; a Los Alamos contingent that included Norris Bradbury, Carson Mark, Lothar Nordheim, and Edward Teller; John Wheeler from Matterhorn; and what I call the “bigthree” consultants: Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann—in total about twenty people. Progress toward a thermonuclear weapon was to be a principal agenda item…

For some reason, the number ^$20,000 has stuck in my head over the years. It is the amount I heard that the AEC was paying the National Bureau of Standards per month for the graveyard shift on the SEAC. That was about 50 times my salary at the time, so it was memorable…

There's another number that got stuck in my head—7 megatons. The sequence of events in Mike was quick, extremely quick, but it was a sequence, one thing after another. First the explosion of the fission trigger, then the flow of radiation, then the implosion of the “sausage,” and finally the thermonuclear burning and the secondary fission. The last part of this sequence is what I calculated for many weeks of overnights on the SEAC. From all of this flowed a single number, 7 megatons, our predicted energy release, or “yield,” of Mike. As it turned out, Mike flexed its muscles and did better than that…

The following sections are included:

• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• End Notes
• Bibliography
• Index