Even before Harry Truman decided to announce work on a hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, Stanislaw Ulam and George Gamow had organized an informal committee at Los Alamos to move the project along. Gamow, a tall, blond Russian, was a brilliant original and a wild man. To commemorate the informal committee he had drawn a witty cartoon of its three leaders miming their Super ideas while a winged, pipe-smoking Stalin flew into frame clutching a bomb labeled “Made in USSR” in his talons and Robert Oppen-heimer, robed as a saint with a radiant halo, hovered on a cloud dangling an olive branch. Gamow depicted Ulam spitting wine into a spittoon, Teller wearing an Indian necklace hung with a womb symbol like the Greek letter omega (“vombb,” Gamow pronounced it in his heavy Russian accent), Gamow himself holding up a cat and squeezing its tail. Ulam's spitting may have symbolized neutron transport into the main mass of deuterium; Gamow's tail squeeze referred to an invention of his called “the cat's tail” — possibly cylindrical implosion of the fission trigger; Teller's womb was his classical Super. “Both Gamow and I showed a lot of independence of thought in our meetings,” Ulam reports, “and Teller did not like this very much.” One of Ulam's independent thoughts, which he expressed at a committee meeting on January 21, was that the Super would probably require much more tritium than Teller had recently estimated and that ignition prospects looked “miserable.” “Not too surprisingly,” Ulam concludes, “the original ‘super’ directing committee soon ceased to exist.” Ulam recalls that Gamow “was quite put out by this. I did not care, but I wrote him, prophetically it seems, that great troubles would follow because of Edward's obstinacy, his single-mindedness and his overwhelming ambition.”
Gamow and Ulam may have blamed Teller unfairly for the demise of their committee; in the wake of the President's decision, Los Alamos necessarily moved to organize a formal Super committee in February 1950. “The idea… was to get everything that Teller could give, which was a lot,” Technical Associate Director Darol Froman recalled, “but not to let him run the thing. Because he would sure push it too hard and too fast and get all kinds of
people outside the Laboratory up on their ears… People like the AEC.”
Teller got to be chairman of the twenty-five-man so-called Family Committee, with direct responsibility for the lab's thermonuclear programs, but he had to report to Froman, a blunt, no-nonsense administrator who had managed the
Teller immediately set to work recruiting, with mixed results. He thanked Oppenheimer in a February letter “for the help you are giving and are going to give us in this connection” — with recruiting, that is; Oppenheimer was not planning to work on the Super. Bethe was no longer interested. “I still believe that it is morally wrong and unwise for our national security to develop this weapon,” the Cornell physicist wrote Norris Bradbury on February 14. “For this reason, if and when I come to Los Alamos in the future I will completely refrain from any discussions related to the super-bomb… In case of war I would obviously reconsider my position.” Emilio Segre at Berkeley recalled “several conversations with Teller, whom I had known well since my time at the Physics Institute in Rome. I soon realized, however, that he was dominated by irresistible passions much stronger than even his powerful rational intellect.” Segre turned Teller down.
Most of the recruits for the Family Committee came from established Los Alamos staff, including Carson Mark and Weapons Division Leader Marshall Holloway, but Teller was able to enlist Princeton theorist John Archibald Wheeler; Indiana University's Emil Konopinski, who had first suggested using tritium back in 1942, Charles Critchfield, who had worked on solar thermonuclear reactions with Bethe before the war; and talented young Stanford theoretical physicist Marshall Rosenbluth. Rosenbluth decided to return to Los Alamos, where he had been an SED during the war, because of Fuchs. “I thought that what Fuchs knew would make a qualitative difference to the Russians,” Rosenbluth recalls. “He would have told them that we were working on it — and he did. So I assumed that they would be working on it and I thought Stalin was just a terrible son of a bitch. If he ever got the bomb before we did it could be very dangerous. That was basically my motivation.”
Despite these valuable additions to the Los Alamos theoretical staff, Teller complained bitterly to William Borden and anyone else who would listen that “the Laboratory had had some luck in getting the youngest and brightest of the physicists but the senior scientists who feel that such weapons are morally reprehensible have great influence over the younger men.” At the beginning of March, Teller published the equivalent of a want ad in the
“If things were going happily,” says Carson Mark, “[Teller] was an exciting person to have in the group… [But] there were just so many people and there were so many problems and Edward, who could throw out intriguing new ideas, was always doing so and each new one was… the important one today. It was very difficult to continue to make progress… if he was deciding, with as great a frequency as he did, that one should drop that and do this.” Manley recalled “a tendency really to put up with Edward, but also to ignore him, in the Laboratory. I can't remember any real fights about it… He didn't get along with his ideas of what the Lab should do, and yet he was tolerated. I don't believe anybody ever told him to ‘get the hell out of here’ for his views.” Mark agrees: “It was a matter of trying to balance Edward.”
Teller outlined further research on the Super in a seventy-two-page paper,
Teller evidently warmed to the Alarm Clock as an alternative for the same reason the layered design had appealed to Andrei Sakharov: because it was clearly feasible on basic physical principles. It could also be made with lithium deuteride and little or no tritium. (On the other hand, Bethe remembers that “nobody could see a way to compress the Alarm Clock sufficiently to get the desired high densities.”) In the Soviet Union at that time, writes Victor Adamsky, “the idea [of a layer-cake thermonuclear] was mature enough to find its impending implementation… ” Sakharov and Igor Tamm would move to Sarov in March 1950 to pursue it, starting a new second theory department alongside Zeldovich's. A kiloton-range layer cake might form a system no larger than a Fat Man. With plutonium production modest and U235 just becoming available, the Soviet program was willing to settle for a kiloton-range thermonuclear that would stretch out supplies of fissile metals; 80 percent or more of an Alarm Clock's yield would derive from thermonuclear neutrons fissioning ordinary tamper U238.
But Los Alamos, which already knew how to make fission weapons with yields in the hundreds of kilotons, was focused on a megaton-range thermonuclear, and adding layers to a spherical Alarm Clock to push the yield into the megaton range resulted in a mechanism that would be prohibitively large and heavy. “Delivery of such an object by aircraft,” Teller wrote in his February report, “is likely to remain impossible for quite some time to come.” Rather than scale down his megaton ambitions, Teller proposed alternative methods of transportation. “We shall see, however,” he went on, “that delivery by boat or submarine is capable of producing disastrous effects.” To produce disastrous effects on so vast and land-locked a country as the Soviet Union with a weapon that had to be delivered by boat or submarine, Teller was willing to consider devising what he called “a one-billion-ton Alarm Clock,” meaning a device with a one-thousand-megaton yield. Punching a hole in the atmosphere would come into play with such a device, however; “it seems to me likely that it will be difficult to destroy an area greater than approximately one thousand square miles by shock.” Flash burns would be “very serious” at one hundred miles and “an area of 30 thousand square miles[38] would be affected” — but only if the weapon that no aircraft could deliver were somehow detonated more than a mile above the ground. Otherwise, the horizon would limit the damage. So a big shipborne Alarm Clock might destroy Leningrad, but unless it could be sneaked several hundred miles up the Volga River, it would not spread its blast and fire to the nerve center of the Soviet state. It would be a notably dirty bomb, however, and might reach Moscow with lethal radiation, “a strip 40 miles broad and 400 miles long.” For comparison, Teller considered “a bomb of this type dropped [sic] near Washington, D.C. Let us assume that the winds are blowing north along the Alleghenies, a condition quite frequently encountered. Then Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston could all be close to the path of the radioactive cloud and even the farthest point, Boston, would be within reach of the danger.” Killing the Soviet Union with radioactive fallout from Alarm Clocks delivered by (remote-controlled?) Navy ships was not likely to appeal to the
