Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

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Specifically how many weapons the JCS in 1949 asked to have added to the arsenal was still a military secret four decades later, but by 1956 the US stockpile contained 3,620 atomic bombs.

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Arnold Kramish coined RDS-1's American name.

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Kapitza, as it happened, was under house arrest at this time. The difficulty everyone had in mind in 1949 with producing atomic bombs, Soviet or US, was the imagined scarcity of uranium ore. Lawrence and Alvarez would soon propose a system for transmuting thorium to U233 in a particle accelerator of heroic dimensions to help the US resolve this difficulty; when the AEC finally realized that raising the price the government was willing to pay for ore would stimulate prospecting, US proven reserves increased dramatically. The Soviets had already identified plentiful reserves in East Germany as well as Soviet Asia. — RR

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Teller eventually realized that there is a limit to the destructiveness of even thermonuclear explosions. At somewhere around a hundred megatons, he estimates, “it would simply lift a chunk of atmosphere — ten miles in diameter, something of that kind — lift it into space. Then you make it a thousand times bigger still. You know what would happen? You lift the same chunk into space with thirty times the velocity.” Edward Teller interview, Los Alamos, x.93.

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The popular Al Capp comic strip.

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The meson, a nuclear particle postulated theoretically before the Second World War, was discovered shortly after.

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An area 173 miles on a side — about the size of Pennsylvania. — RR

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The Soviet atomic bomb stockpile at the end of 1950, ten months after this meeting, consisted of five RDS-1 plutonium implosion bombs; the US stockpile at the end of 1950 totaled 298 engineered, levitated composite weapons. Neither country had thermonuclear weapons at this time.

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There was not much that Nitze could do about it. He “managed to put together a $10 million program to give the South Koreans some additional fast patrol boats. That was the limit our aid program in those days would support.” Gaddis and Nitze (1980), p. 174.

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Strips of metal foil dropped to confuse enemy radar. — RR

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A nanosecond is one-billionth of a second.

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“Hetero” from a Greek word meaning “the other of two,” “other,” “different”; “catalytic” meaning facilitating a reaction. — RR

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The reaction is D + T > “He + n + 17.59 MeV; the ⁴He nucleus carries 3.5 MeV, the neutron 14 MeV.

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