Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

If a person leaves his country, leaves his continent, leaves his relatives, leaves his friends, the only people he knows are his professional colleagues. If more than ninety percent of these then come around to consider him an enemy, an outcast, it is bound to have an effect. The truth is it had a profound effect. It affected me, it affected [my wife] Mici, it even affected her health.

Some of Teller's colleagues rejected him, perhaps, out of personal animosity. But many others, especially at Los Alamos, did so because they knew it was Edward Teller, not Robert Oppenheimer, who had delayed the development of the hydrogen bomb. He did so by defining that device from the beginning as a mechanism for achieving megaton-range yields. His characteristic grandiosity blinded him to the more modest possibilities of his Alarm Clock, which was inherently physically feasible and practical at high-kiloton yields. I. I. Rabi made the point in his response to Sterling Cole's 1953 questionnaire that asked for comparisons between US and Soviet hydrogen- bomb progress. While Teller, John Wheeler and John von Neumann responded by blaming US delay, Rabi saw the essential difference: “One of the faults of our program is that we set our sights too high in aiming for [megaton yields]. The Russians were apparently much more modest in their goals.” From a longer perspective, and with information direct from Russian sources about the Soviet layer-cake design, Carson Mark reached the same conclusion in 1994:

The idea of the Alarm Clock, which was similar to Sakharov's layer cake, came up here at the end of the summer of 1946. It came on the scene — Teller's excited and enthusiastic proposal — as a way to build a hydrogen bomb. The hydrogen bomb, however, carried with it the irrelevant trapping that it wasn't a hydrogen bomb unless it gave a megaton or was multi-megaton. It wasn't a hydrogen bomb unless it had the potential to increase the yield indefinitely. The Russians seem to have approached Joe 4 by asking, What can you do with this new idea in a Trinity-size system? They did that and they got half a megaton. What got asked here was, how big would it have to be to give a megaton, or ten megatons. The answer that came back was that it would have to be too big. You needed to start with a fission bomb of possibly a megaton size all by itself — and at that time we had a perfectly clear way of making twenty kilotons, period. Now, of course, it didn't have to be bigger than the Trinity bomb, but it did if it had to carry these trappings. Semantics. So we dropped it and never put it to a test in the form which, had we happened to think of it, could have been interesting in the sense that Joe 4 was. You say, Why didn't you realize that you were screwing things up by taking that approach? I think we realize now — or at least it's my conviction — that we did screw up by taking that approach.

If, starting in late 1946, the US had pursued building a simple Alarm Clock with a single layer of fusion material rather than the unwieldy multi-layered object Teller proposed, then it almost certainly could have tested a half-megaton version by 1949, when the other weapons in its arsenal were still under one hundred kilotons, and a megaton version within another year or two. When the Soviet Union tested Joe 1, in August 1949, US political, scientific and military leaders would have enjoyed the security of knowing that the US still controlled a unique capability. Ulam and Teller might still have invented a two-stage system by 1951. An ugly division in the nation's political and scientific communities might have been avoided.

The nation went anouher way, more expensive, divisive and dangerous. It did so primarily because Edward Teller, an ambitious and ruthless but also a charismatic man, defined the terms of US hydrogen-bomb research, and Teller's idee fixe blinded him to the promise of incremental achievement that Andrei Sakharov immediately recognized.

Teller had believed since childhood that only the technological application of science could save the human world from doom. In little Hungary that doom seemed Russian — “a totalitarian regime for seven hundred years,” Teller characterized Russian governing once. In the United States, despite the nation's awesome military and economic power, that doom seemed to Teller Russian still. Stanislaw Ulam recalled speculating with John von Neumann about the reasons why Hungary produced so many brilliant scientists in the early years of the twentieth century. “Johnny used to say that it was a coincidence of some cultural factors which he could not make precise: an external pressure on the whole society of this part of Central Europe, a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or else face extinction.” They came to America and devoted themselves gratefully to inventing weapons, thinking to make their adopted country more secure; instead, as in old tragedy, they extended the conditions of their critically unstable Central European past across the earth: the pressure became universal, the insecurity general, the dark unusual spilled forth at every hand, the human world faced extinction. They did not, of course, work alone.

Hans Bethe was the principal scientific adviser to the US government during negotiations on the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which moved most nuclear testing underground. He received the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on energy production in stars. He was still publishing original scientific papers in 1995.

Enrico Fermi died prematurely of stomach cancer in the autumn of 1954. John von Neumann died prematurely of brain cancer in 1957.

Klaus Fuchs was released from Wakefield Prison in 1959 after serving nine years of his fourteen-year sentence. England had revoked his citizenship, a punishment more painful to him than prison; he flew immediately to East Germany, where he became deputy director and then director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossdorf, near Dresden. He died in 1988.

Harry Gold was paroled in 1966 after serving sixteen years of his thirty-year sentence. He found work in medical research at a Philadelphia hospital, as he had hoped to do. He patented a device for the office testing of blood, but his time ran out before he could turn his patent to account: he died during open-heart surgery in 1972.

David and Ruth Greenglass changed their family name after David was paroled but continue to live in the New York area. David has prospered as an inventor. When Ronald Radosh interviewed him in 1979, he declared himself to be a Debsian socialist.

Morris and Lona Cohen continued espionage work for the KGB in Britain as Peter and Helen Kroger, antiquarian booksellers, until 1961, when they were arrested, conviaed and sentenced to a twenty-year term. The KGB negotiated the exchange of their Soviet control but abandoned them to serve out their time. After their release from prison they emigrated to the Soviet Union and lived to see it collapse.

Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963- The KGB suspected him of being a double agent and limited his work to lectures at its espionage school. He died in Moscow in 1988.

Curtis LeMay teamed with George Wallace to run unsuccessfully in 1968 as an independent candidate for the Vice-Presidency of the United States. He died in 1990.

On the last morning of his life, February 7, I960, a Sunday, Igor Kurchatov drove to a spa near Moscow to visit Maria and Yuli Khariton, who were guests there. Playfully the Beard tuned the Kharitons’ radio to a waltz and danced with his old friend Maria Nikolaevna. He told her how he had recently wangled a ticket to a wonderful performance of Mozart's Requiem and asked her to help him choose floor tiles for a new lab. All the time, write the Zukermans, the clock was ticking a countdown as it had so many times in his work:

Kurchatov puts on his coat and takes Khariton by the arm. “Let's go for a little walk, Yuli Borisovich, and talk some shop…” And the clock is still silently ticking away the remaining minutes.

They head for the park. It's below freezing out, sunny. The bare trees are powdered with snow. Igor Vasilievich picks out a park bench and brushes off the snow to make a place for the two of them.

“Let's sit for a while right here.”

Yuli Borisovich starts telling Kurchatov about his latest experimental results. Kurchatov, who is always responsive in conversation, isn't answering. Yuli Borisovich is gripped with sudden alarm. He turns quickly and sees that Igor Vasilevich's eyes are glassing over. He shouts at the top of his voice, “There's something wrong with Kurchatov!” Secretaries and doctors come running, but it's too late. A small blood clot had occluded the coronary artery. The countdown clock read zero. The heart had stopped, and the mind had ceased all functioning.

Kurchatov was fifty-seven. Russians say that the strain of working for Lavrenti Beria shortened his life.

Yuli Khariton served as scientific director of Sarov until 1992, his eighty-eighth year, traveling back and forth to Moscow in his private railroad car. His colleagues call him “the Biological Phenomenon.”