purposes.
That this situation can be avoided by the withdrawal of all Chinese troops from Korea and the stoppage of all supplies of war materials by Russia to Communist China. We mean business. We did not start this Korean affair but we intend to end it for the benefit of the Korean people, the authority of the United Nations and the peace of the world.
We are tired of these phony calls for peace when there is no intention to make an honest approach to peace. There are events in the immediate past which make it perfectly plain that the Soviet Government does not want peace.
It has broken every agreement made at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam.
It raped Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania.
The citizens of these countries who believe in self government have either been murdered or are in state labor camps.
Prisoners of World War II to the number of some 3,000,000 are still held at state labor contrary to cease fire terms.
Children have been kidnapped in every country occupied by Russia by the thousand [sic] and never again heard from.
This program is evidently a continuing one.
It must stop and stop now. We of the free world have suffered long enough.
Get the Chinamen out of Korea.
Give Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Rumania and Hungary their freedom.
Stop supplying war materials to the thugs who are attacking the free world and settle down to an honorable policy of keeping agreements which have already been made.
This means all out war. It means that Moscow, St. Petersburg [sic: Leningrad], Mukden, Vladivostock, Peking, Shanghai, Port Arthur, Darien, Odessa, Stalingrad and every manufacturing plant in China and the Soviet Union will be eliminated.
This is the final chance for the Soviet Government to decide whether it desires to survive or not.
Curtis LeMay felt similarly frustrated by a difficult political conflict that was building with weapons inventories to higher and higher levels of tension without release. “I, for one,” the SAC commander told a Scripps-How-ard reporter early in the Korean War, “don't want to stay in this state of tension for fifty years or more.” LeMay thought instead that “we should vigorously go after our aims short of war, but at all times be ready for war.” He clarified what he meant by “ready” when the reporter asked him about preventive war: “Any responsible Air Force officer will not advocate a preventive war, but you do have to risk it and be ready to fight.” LeMay knew the time was coming when the Soviet Union would have the capability to knock out SAC on the ground; the USAF estimated that a minimum Soviet capability to do so would exist by the middle of 1951, whatever the CIA's doubts. Curtis LeMay, who loved his country, intended to find a way to forestall such a disaster even if it meant risking preventive war.
23
Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors
Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett finished their second round of Super ignition calculations to discouraging results on June 16,1950, shortly before the beginning of the Korean War. They established tentatively — pending the results of more detailed computer calculations — that igniting a tank of liquid deuterium with the heat from an atomic bomb would require impractical amounts of tritium, if the process worked at all. Enrico Fermi had returned to Los Alamos for the summer to help out with thermonuclear research. He and Ulam decided to take up calculating the next question raised by Edward Teller's Super design: whether, if the deuterium tank could be ignited at one end, burning would become self-sustaining and progress through the material.
“We did this again in time-step stages,” Ulam recalls, “with intuitive estimates and marvelous simplifications introduced by Fermi — I believe this work with Fermi to have been even more important than the calculations made with Everett.” Fermi had brought along with him from Chicago a young protege named Richard Garwin, whose desk abutted Fermi's in the small office they shared; Garwin remembers watching the Super calculations proceeding across the summer:
Fermi and Ulam would prepare an accounting spread sheet. You write some differential equations calculating the burning of a large cylinder of liquid deuterium. You write a temperature over here and ask what happens as a function of time as neutrons and radiation and so on go down the cylinder. This [column on the spreadsheet] would be time, this [column] would be different radiation and you would have temperatures [in yet another column]. Fermi would do a couple of columns and give them to [an assistant with a large adding machine] and [the assistant] would bring them back the next day. The problem was that as time went on, this thing would decay; it would be burn versus radius. You can't get [the cylinder of deuterium] to burn because the energy escapes faster than it reproduces itself. With this calculation, they established for their own purposes that the classical Super would not work… All the time [spent developing the classical Super] was wasted. There had been miscalculation, because Teller was optimistic.
In the final report that the two men wrote, Fermi puckishly defined the difficulty as one that would vanish if only the basic physical constants could be changed: “If the cross sections for the nuclear reactions could somehow be two or three times larger than what was measured and assumed, die reaction could behave more successfully.” (In fact, the actual cross sections, as remeasured experimentally at Los Alamos during 1951, proved to be even smaller and less promising man the less accurate measurements that Fermi and Ulam used.)
While Fermi and Ulam proceeded with their calculations, work also continued at Los Alamos toward the
It was not a thing mat we were busily working at except as a sequel to the Russian test. So okay, it was agreed we must do something that relates to the thermonuclear business; what would be a good thing to turn attention to? There were at least two different proposals, one mainly talked over and introduced by [George] Gamow and one which Teller favored. Both had to do with notions that fitted into the picture of a classical Super, as things we might be in a position to do and might be useful in that connection — things that would have to be done anyway, if one went that route. And it was from that rather vague scrambling of ideas that the detailed form of the George shot emerged. It was the pattern that Edward had favored. It turned out that it was very much the pattern of the 1945 Fuchs-von Neumann patent… It wasn't by any means a copy from that but it did about the same thing and related to the Super in about the same way of their patent — namely, a possible way of getting the first step from a fission bomb towards heating deuterium to a point where it might burn. And that's what the George shot was about. It was doing things which we had never taken seriously to do before which had been sort of sketched out in an arm-waving fashion.
Theoretical physicist Marshall Rosenblufh, who worked on the Cylinder, explains the strategy of the design: “The idea was to try to look at some burning thermonuclear fuel and to do it in a way where you could clearly diagnose it. It wasn't so very obvious where this was going to get you, other than as an experiment with the relevant material — DT — in which you could look in detail at how the temperature would change, density was
