Golem was reputed to be the great medieval scholar Rabbi Loew of Prague. In some versions of the myth, the Golem goes out of control and becomes destructive, like a robot run amok. Ulam's Aunt Caro, he writes in his autobiography, “was directly related to the famous Rabbi Loew of sixteenth-century Prague, who, the legend says, made the Golem… ” Ulam recalls mentioning this exotic connection once to MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener. “[Wiener] said, alluding to my involvement with Los Alamos and with the H-bomb, It is still in the family!’” Ulam's implicit claim to have called forth the Golem compares in scale to Robert Oppenheimer's famous characterization of the atomic bomb as a manifestation of Vishnu: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The difference in the two claims is style: Ulam's cool and understated, as he was; Oppenheimer's more urgent and committed but psychically dissonant. Oppenheimer's allusion had amused Ulam when he first heard it; he thought Oppenheimer was referring to himself and considered the claim pretentious. People called the rabbi's Golem “Dumb Yossel,” one commentator notes. It sat in the room where the Rabbi held court, its head resting in its hands, without any mind or thought of anything at all, waiting to be summoned.
Edward Teller seems to have found it intolerable that someone might share credit for the historic invention on which he had been working single-mindedly for almost ten years; he moved immediately to take over the technical breakthrough and make it his own. After he and Ulam issued their joint report, Franchise Ulam observes, “my impression is that from then on Teller pushed Stan aside and refused to deal with him any longer. He never met or talked with Stan meaningfully ever again. Stan was, I felt, more wounded than he knew by this unfriendly reception, although I never heard him express ill feelings toward Teller. (He rather pitied him instead.) Secure in his own mind that his input had been useful, he withdrew.” (Carson Mark confirms Franchise Ulam's impression: “Ulam felt that he invented the new approach to the hydrogen bomb. Teller didn't wish to recognize that. He couldn't bring himself to recognize it. He's taken occasion, almost every occasion he could, not every one, to deny that Ulam contributed anything. I think I know exactly what happened in the interaction of those two. Edward would violently disagree with what I would say. It would be much closer to Ulam's view of how it happened.”)
Later in March, Teller added a crucial additional stage to the Teller-Ulam configuration: a second fission component positioned within the thermonuclear second stage to increase the efficiency of thermonuclear burning. A symmetrical shock wave moving inward through a cylinder of deuterium converges in the middle on itself, at which point the decelerating motion of the imploding material is converted to heat. The small region at the center of the long axis of the cylindrical mass of thermonuclear material, where the heat is thus confined, came to be called the “sparkplug”; it was in this region that thermonuclear burning would initiate. Teller realized that a subcritical stick of U235 or plutonium, positioned where the sparkplug would form at the center axis of the deuterium cylinder, would be compressed to supercriticality by the leading edge of the imploding shock wave. This second fission explosion would then push outward against the implosion that was pushing inward; with careful design, the main implosion and the sparkplug explosion might be made to come to equilibrium, stabilizing in a hot, highly compressed critical layer that would advance outward through the deuterium fuel mass and burn it much more efficiently and completely than could an unboosted sparkplug alone. Teller called this design “an equilibrium thermonuclear gadget” in a report he signed on April 4, 1951; he claimed it in the report's subtitle as “a new thermonuclear device.”
The fission sparkplug piggybacked on Ulam's previous breakthrough to staging and compression. It may also have been suggested to Teller, probably subliminally, by Ulam's original idea of using a fission bomb to ignite a second fission bomb, the idea that had led to the breakthrough of staging. Bethe would characterize Teller's invention as representing “the very important second half of the new concept.” Carson Mark discounts its originality. “The sparkplug is an obvious idea,” he comments, “that occurred to anyone who looked at the system. You ask what do I do if I have it compressed and you think of the sparkplug.” However obvious, when physicists refer to the “true” hydrogen bomb as it came to be developed, they customarily cite the Teller-Ulam invention — staging, implosive fuel compression before ignition and a fission-boosted sparkplug — as its ingenious principal mechanism.
Its virtues were not immediately celebrated, as Ulam's remark to von Neumann about the kiss-of-death effect of Teller's enthusiasm makes clear. “I'm not sure that it's fair to say that everybody immediately said, ‘Ah ha!’” Marshall Rosenbluth observes. “Everybody realized that the Teller-Ulam invention was a new way of looking at the problem and of course a number of questions immediately arose and people did calculations. After a couple of months the calculations looked pretty good, but they were still pretty crude and it was probably another year before really detailed calculations had been done.” Ulam told a meeting of laboratory division leaders on March 6 that they might need years to evaluate his and Teller's new ideas. Mark notes on the other hand that the Teller-Ulam proposals “immediately put everything in a new focus; immediately gave jobs for the cryogenists, metallurgists, the mechanical engineers, the test people, everybody to focus on and proceed. Here was a plan which came out of the theoretical work. They could all see the drawings and say, ‘Well, I can do this and you can do that.’ That's what was lacking in the earlier time. There wasn't anything to say, “Well, it's now clear that we really put all our efforts on building this object and getting all the things we need… ”
The fact that the lab was not immediately sold on the equilibrium thermonuclear frustrated Teller in the extreme. He debated with Darol Froman organizing a new laboratory division, but increased his lobbying in Washington for a second laboratory, to be sited perhaps north of Denver in Boulder, Colorado, where the National Bureau of Standards was breaking ground in May for a new AEC-funded Cryogenic Engineering Laboratory to produce liquid deuterium. Froman, fronting for Norris Bradbury, resisted setting up a thermonuclear division under Teller; so did Carson Mark.
George would be a tower shot; after two tests of new, more efficient and compact fission designs, the task force fired the Cylinder on May 9, 1951. It yielded 225 kilotons, its 1,800-foot fireball engulfing the shot tower and melting a crater deep into the white Eniwetok coral. Dean noted his impressions:
The first daylight shot since Bikini and the amazing destructiveness of [it] as indicated by the complete disintegration and disappearance of the block house used for the X-ray experiments. The vaporization of the 200- foot steel tower, together with 283 tons of equipment on top of the tower. The complete disappearance of the 6 cast iron, 6 feet tall, sample catchers and the crater filled with water.
For Teller, whose last nuclear test had been Trinity, the shot evoked deja vu. “Rising early that May morning,” he recalled, “we walked through the tropical heat to the beach of Eniwetok's placid lagoon. We put on dark glasses, as had been done for the test in Alamogordo. Again we saw the brilliance of another nuclear explosion. Again we felt the heat of the blast on our faces, but still we did not know if the experiment had been a success. We did not know whether or not the heavy hydrogen had been ignited.” They would have to wait for the results of the Allred-Rosen experiment. Lawrence invited Teller for a swim that afternoon. The brooding Hungarian
