changing, all sorts of neutrons were being produced — the detailed diagnostics. Teller's idea was that we needed to put this DT where we could see it, not in the middle of an explosion, so we'll pipe some radiation out to it.” One of the test planners described the Cylinder at the time as “an experiment in which [a] nuclear explosion is [to be] used to send material down a tube and cause a thermonuclear reaction of small magnitude in deuterium.” Jastrow says the Cylinder used “the energy of a 500-kiloton atomic bomb to ignite a fraction of an ounce of deuterium and tritium placed in a small adjoining chamber… Everyone knew beforehand that it was pretty certain to work; using a huge atomic bomb to ignite the little vial of deuterium and tritium was like using a blast furnace to light a match.”
When a mass of uranium or plutonium fissions in an atomic bomb, nearly all of the energy released takes the form of electromagnetic radiation, the class of radiation that includes visible light. Such radiation consists of weightless packets of waves called photons, which travel at the speed of light: 186,400 miles per second or 1 foot per nanosecond.[42] Photons have wavelengths that differ according to their energy — the more energetic the photon, the shorter the wavelength. The coils of an electric heater demonstrate the connection between energy and wavelength as they warm and begin to glow, heating from invisible longer waves of infrared (which humans perceive as warmth) to dark red to orange to yellow, each color produced by the effect on the human eye of photons of progressively shorter wavelength. An even hotter acetylene torch burns blue-white. Farther up the same continuum, a hot sunlamp filament radiates invisible ultraviolet light. Beyond ultraviolet come soft X rays, hard X rays and gamma rays, all a function of the temperature of the radiating material (that is, of the energetic motion of the material's atoms), each type of radiation consisting of photons of shorter wavelength than the last. Graphs of the radiation coming from the electric heater, the acetylene torch, the sunlamp filament or an atomic fireball would all show the same basic sharply peaked curve, with the peak shifted in each case to whichever region of radiation predominates. The Big Bang that started the universe created a fireball with a similar curve that shifted its peak across the aeons downward through progressively longer wavelengths as the universe cooled until it now peaks in the cold microwave region below infrared — the famous 2.7° Kelvin cosmic microwave background. Indeed, the universe itself is a cooling fireball similar to a nuclear-weapon fireball, an artifact of the Big Bang.
Radiation from an atomic fireball peaks in the soft-X-ray region. Even a small atomic bomb produces an enormous flux of radiant energy; if a cube of that flux could somehow be cut out and weighed it would reveal itself to be many times heavier than an equivalent cube of lead. Clearly, that many extremely hot photons moving densely together can penetrate and heat material objects to high temperatures. As Rosenbluth emphasizes, the idea of the Cylinder was to make some deuterium fuse with some tritium away from the immediate vicinity of an exploding fission bomb, where the reaction could be instrumented and studied. The Booster, in contrast, was designed to compress and ignite some DT
The following week, the AEC's General Advisory Committee came to Los Alamos to review the thermonuclear program. The GAC had several new members now, appointed in part because of their enthusiasm for the H-bomb. The most accomplished among them was chemist Willard Libby, whose 1946 development of radiocarbon dating would eventually win him a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Libby's enthusiasm for the H-bomb translated into suspicion of Robert Oppenheimer as well; Libby believed that Oppen-heimer had been “more or less the head” of “a strong Communist contingent at Berkeley” during the Second World War.
The GAC majority had reelected Oppenheimer to chair the committee despite the debacle of the H-bomb debate. Aware that he had become controversial, he had recently offered Gordon Dean his resignation. “[Oppenheimer] said he knew that we had had quite a disagreement on the H-bomb program back in 1949,” the AEC chairman recalled. “… He told me that he thought that this had perhaps hurt his effectiveness on the… Committee, and that he was prepared to get off if for one moment I thought… that he could not serve. I thought about it for a few moments… and I told him that… the… Committee would definitely lose, and so would the Commission, if we lost him from it at that time.” Oppenheimer convened the GAC at Los Alamos at the end of October 1950 to give the committee's new members “some feeling for the sort of place [Los Alamos] is,” he told Norris Bradbury, because they “kept suggesting that a second Los Alamos be set up in order to relieve the work of the first.” Oppenheimer's explanation makes it clear that Teller was agitating for a second laboratory before the end of 1950; Bethe traces Teller's vision of a separate laboratory devoted primarily to thermonuclear research even further back, to as early as 1947.
At Los Alamos, the GAC reviewed the Ulam-Everett and Ulam-Fermi calculations, a new model of the Alarm Clock that Teller and John Wheeler had proposed and the ‘plans for the classical Super itself. The advisers were particularly enthusiastic about the Cylinder. “New and elaborate instrumentation forms an essential part of this test,” Oppenheimer summarized their understanding. “If the tests and the instrumentation are reasonably successful, radically new information will be obtained. This information bears on the non-equilibrium burning of tritium-deuterium mixtures and on the phenomena associated with the flow of radiation from fission weapons into materials of varying density, and will be relevant to many thermonuclear models.”
Despite their praise, the committee members understood that the Cylinder was a demonstration as much as an experiment and was not a potential breakthrough to a thermonuclear. “We wish to make it clear, however, that the test, whether successful or not, is neither a proof firing of a possible thermonuclear weapon nor a test of the feasibility of such a weapon. The test is not addressed to resolving the paramount uncertainties which are decisive in evaluating the feasibility of the Super.”
“Teller took the floor to summarize the Super,” the official AEC history reports of the Los Alamos GAC meeting. “In his briefing he could offer little more than determination… He had no new ideas. In some way success would be grasped — how, he did not know.” Bankrupt of ideas though he admitted himself to be, Teller could still insult his Los Alamos colleagues. “Even the victory might be dangerous to Los Alamos,” the AEC history continues its paraphrase of his presentation. “If the [George] test showed the Super impossible, Teller believed the laboratory was strong enough to continue its work, but if the reverse were true — if the test showed the Super was possible — the laboratory might not be strong enough to exploit the triumph.” (“I sensed the tension in the corridors,” Frangoise Ulam remembers of that time, “the bafflement and sometimes annoyance at Teller's autocratic behavior and temperamental outbursts. I had the feeling that nobody quite knew how to handle his demands, and sort of caved under, except [her husband] Stan… ”)
In fact the failure was Teller's, Hans Bethe observes, not the laboratory's:
That Ulam's calculations had to be done at all was proof that the H-bomb project was not ready for a “crash” program when Teller first advocated such a program in the fall of 1949. Nobody will blame Teller because the calculations of 1946 were wrong, especially because adequate computing machines were not then available. But he was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the Laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous program on the basis of calculations which he himself must have known to have been very incomplete.
George Gamow found a way to dramatize how unpromising Teller's Super had proven to be. John McPhee reports the story as Los Alamos physicist Theodore Taylor remembered it. “One day, at a meeting of people who
