Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

asked of his business interests at a hearing a few years later; “Sardines,” he would answer), cautioned the JCAE that tritium production would be a serious problem. “It requires a great deal more reactivity than we have in any pile we have built or under contemplation unless we look forward to a considerable reduction in plutonium production.” To made tritium in a reactor, the reactor has to be souped up to generate more neutrons. In a graphite reactor that means replacing a portion of the natural-uranium slugs with slugs of U235. Since U235 fissions with neutron capture rather than transmuting to neptunium and then plutonium, using more U235 reduces plutonium production. Breeding tritium in existing AEC reactors, Pike would explain at another time, meant that “the cost of producing tritium in terms of plutonium that might otherwise be produced looked fantastically high — 80 to 100 times, probably, gram for gram.” Unless it built a new generation of reactors, that is, the US would have to forgo eighty to one hundred kilograms of plutonium — enough for thirty to forty composite-core atomic bombs — for every kilogram of tritium it produced. Pike thought the time might have come to start building at least the first of that new generation of reactors. “If we look forward to a success of the booster in 1951, it is not too early to [begin]… This would be doing quite a little finessing, and a month or so ago [i.e., before the Soviet test], I would have questioned even the sense of bringing it up. I don't question it now and I think that it should be put on the table.”

McMahon, coached by Borden, found this collective recitation of bru-talisms undaunting. Nor did it matter to the JCAE, as Pike would also point out that autumn, “that we had no knowledge that the military needed such a weapon.” The JCAE did not even know at that time how many atomic bombs the US held in its stockpile. Borden had already concluded on the committee's behalf that the survival of the nation depended on building many more such bombs while simultaneously pursuing another of his Utopian fantasies, the ultimate weapons system of a thermonuclear bomb delivered by a nuclear-powered bomber.

David Lilienthal wanted nothing to do with such technological fanaticism. The chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission found nuclear weapons obscene. After Norris Bradbury and Los Alamos Associate Director Darol Froman had briefed him on the Sandstone tests in June 1948 he had denounced the “keen enthusiasm” of the Los Alamos men in his diary. “I don't object at all,” he wrote, “… to expressions of satisfaction that the job… is being pushed and done well; but that there should not be even a single ‘token’ expression of profound concern and regret that we are engaged in developing weapons directed against the indiscriminate destruction of defenseless men, women and children… this bothered me.” When Lilienthal returned from Martha's Vineyard and met with his fellow commissioners on the morning of October 5, he took up not the thermonuclear question but the proposal that the Joint Chiefs had instigated early in 1949 for a major AEC production expansion. Strauss by then had drafted his thermonuclear memorandum and had tried it out on Pike and new commissioner Gordon Dean, a Seattle native and Nuremberg trial staff assistant who had been Brien McMahon's law partner. Since Lilienthal did not bring up the thermonuclear question, Strauss had no chance to present his memorandum and had to distribute copies to his colleagues after the meeting. Strauss felt, he informed them, that a “larger stockpile of weapons than the Russians” was not a sufficient response to the Soviet test because “our relative lead is likely to decrease.” Instead, echoing Golden, Strauss proposed:

It seems to me that the time has now come for a quantum jump in our planning (to borrow a metaphor from our scientist friends) — that is to say, that we should now make an intensive effort to get ahead with the super. By intensive effort, I am thinking of a commitment in talent and money comparable, if necessary, to that which produced the first atomic weapon. That is the way to stay ahead.

Strauss concluded that the commission should “immediately consult the General Advisory Committee to ascertain their views as to how we can proceed with expedition.”

Never one to trust to open debate alone what he could more reliably transact by subterfuge, Strauss passed from the morning AEC meeting directly to lunch with his fellow Rear Admiral Sidney Souers. Half a decade later, Souers remembered the occasion well:

Strauss came to me shortly after the Russians had exploded their atomic bomb… I didn't know anything about this super-bomb, this H-bomb, until Strauss came into my office then. Strauss looked upon me as a fellow security man and asked me whether the President had ever had any information on the super-bomb, and if he had, had he made a decision with regard to going ahead with it. I said, “Lewis, as far as I know, he has had none, none from me anyway. Can we build one?” [Strauss] said, “Yes,” and I said, “Then why in the world don't we build it?” He said, “Well, I don't think [the President] has been informed because Lilienthal is opposed to it.” I said, “You should certainly see that it gets to the President so that he can get the facts and make a decision.”… The next morning at our meeting I told [the President] about this conversation… I… asked him if he had had any information on it. He said, “No, but you tell Strauss to go to it and fast.”… I did call Strauss. I told him I had thought about it overnight, and that… he should expedite it. With that he got busy…

Until October 6,1949, the President of the United States had never heard of the hydrogen bomb.

20 ‘Gung-ho for the Super’

Wendell Latimer, the Berkeley chemistry dean, remembered that he “really got concerned” about the United States's military position after the Soviet Union tested Joe 1. On October 5, 1949, the same day Lewis Strauss in Washington proposed a “quantum jump” in nuclear firepower to his fellow commissioners on the AEC, Latimer discussed his concern with Luis Alvarez, Ernest Lawrence's protege at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. Alvarez, a prolific and successful inventor as well as a physicist of Nobel Prize caliber, decided to start a diary that Wednesday, as he had done in the early days of Second World War radar research, for history and to establish patent priorities should inventions turn up along the way. “Latimer and I independently thought that the Russians could be working hard on the super,” Alvarez opened his diary, “and might get there ahead of us. The only thing to do seems to be to get there first — but hope that will turn out to be impossible.” Fundamental physical principles might make a thermonuclear impossible, that is, but if such a weapon could be built, Latimer and Alvarez believed the US should build it before the Soviet Union.

The next day, Latimer recalls, he “got hold of Ernest Lawrence and I said, ‘Listen, we have to do something about it'… I saw Ernest Lawrence in the Faculty Club on the campus.” Apparently Latimer advised Lawrence to explore the question with Alvarez; the Nobel laureate physicist dropped by Alvarez's office at the Radiation Laboratory that same afternoon. “Talked with E.O.L. about the project,” Alvarez noted in his diary afterward, “and he took it very seriously — in fact he had just come from a session with Latimer. We called up Teller at Los Alamos to find out how the theory had progressed in the last four years.” Teller was excited to hear that two such influential colleagues were interested in the thermonuclear, but since the project was secret, he could say little on the phone. Lawrence happened to be traveling east that weekend for a meeting in Washington on Sunday of a panel on radiological warfare — “a subject,” writes Alvarez, “which was very close to… Lawrence's heart.” The Radiation Laboratory director asked Alvarez to join him and proposed they detour through Los Alamos to talk to Teller. The two men left San Francisco that evening and landed in Albuquerque at three a.m. The next morning they flew up to Los Alamos.

At the weapons laboratory that Friday, Lawrence and Alvarez talked with Teller, Associate Director John Manley, Stanislaw Ulam and visiting Russian emigre theoretical physicist George Gamow. “They give [the] project [a] good chance if there is plenty of tritium available,” Alvarez noted in his diary. “There must be a lot of machine calculations done to check the hydrodynamics, and Princeton and L.A. are getting their machines ready.” The machines Alvarez and Lawrence heard about were more capacious, all-electronic successors to the ENIAC computer, one being built at John von Neumann's direction at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a copy under construction at Los Alamos. Theoretical Division leader J. Carson Mark had lured Nicholas Metropolis from the University of Chicago in January 1949 to direct the computer project. As a joke, in what Metropolis calls “a conscious effort to end the naming of computers [that]… had just the opposite effect,” the Chicago mathematician had named the Los Alamos computer the MANIAC. (Gamow decided that the pseudo- acronym stood for ‘Jkfetropo-lis and Neumann /nvent Awful Contraption.”) Los Alamos needed the new computer, observes Carson Mark, because “we really couldn't make any headway with what is called the main Super problem in a finite time with the kind of computing power… [previously] available… ” The