The Making of the Atomic Bomb

TNT equivalent — 10 megatons. The ingredients for the classical Super would be an atomic bomb, a cubic meter of liquid deuterium and an indefinite amount of the rare second isotope of hydrogen, tritium, which because of its short 12.26-year half-life does not normally exist in nature but can be created in a nuclear reactor by bombarding lithium with neutrons. How these components would have been arranged in the classical Super is still secret: probably spherically, the fission trigger and hydrogen isotopes physically contiguous and contained within a heavy tamper.

“It is likely,” the conference decided on the basis of the Teller group's calculations, “that a super-bomb can be constructed and will work. Definite proof of this can hardly ever be expected and a final decision can be made only by a test of the completely assembled super-bomb.” The conference called for “a detailed calculation” to study mathematically the probable progress of the explosion (the hand calculations that Teller and his group had made to arrive at the classical Super were necessarily, given the complexity of the problem, rough and incomplete). The conference also found that Teller's design was “on the whole workable.” Some participants had doubts; “should the doubts prove well-founded, simple modifications of the design will render the model feasible.” In conclusion:

The undertaking of the new and important Super Bomb project would necessarily involve a considerable fraction of the resources which are likely to be devoted to work on atomic developments in the next years… We feel it appropriate to point out that further decision in a matter so filled with the most serious implications as is this one can properly be taken only as part of the highest national policy.

In June 1946, three months after the Super conference, the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile consisted of only nine Fat Man bombs, of which no more than seven could be made operational for lack of initiators. The stockpile held only thirteen bombs a year later, two years after the end of the war. Plutonium production was the crucial bottleneck. The high neutron flux of the Hanford production piles had proven damaging. One had been unloaded in May to prevent further damage and the other damped back to 80 percent of its full capacity. Anything Los Alamos could do, therefore, to improve fission bomb design would significantly bolster the U.S. nuclear arsenal at a time of increasing conflict with the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, about half the Theoretical Division's time between 1946 and 1950 went to the Super. Atomic bombs by then were a matter more of engineering than of theoretical physics, to be sure, but the complexities of the thermonuclear problem also tantalized.

There ensued a curious period of optimism in Teller's life. His wife Mici bore him a second child, a daughter, in the summer of 1946 and he found more time for his family. He was caught up again in the grandeur and the deeply satisfying creativity of basic science. “The years after Los Alamos,” writes Eugene Wigner, “and until the renewal of his preoccupation with national security, were perhaps Teller's most fruitful years scientifically.” Teller taught, co-authored thirteen scientific papers, regularly visited Los Alamos to consult, wrote articles for the new Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In the Bulletin he called for an end to secrecy where “purely scientific data” are concerned. He praised as “ingenious, daring and basically sound” the Acheson-Lilienthal Report that became the basis of the Baruch Plan for international control of nuclear weapons that the United States offered to the United Nations in 1946. He recognized the absolutes of the absolute weapon in April 1946, the same month as the Super conference, in a surprising profession of faith: “Nothing that we can plan as a defense for the next generation is likely to be satisfactory; that is, nothing but world-union.”

A year later he still saw no defense against atomic weapons. He described with compassionate horror the terrible devastation of Hiroshima: “One is struck by the picture of fires raging unopposed, wounds remaining unattended, sick men killing themselves with the exertions of helping their fellows.” It was even possible to imagine, he wrote, “that the effects of an atomic war will endanger the survival of man.” He thought in December 1947, in the wake of Soviet rejection of the Baruch Plan, that “agreement with the Russians still seems possible”; the Danes, he noted waggishly, were once similarly imperialistic and ambitious. “We must now work for world law and world government… Even if Russia should not join immediately, a successful, powerful, and patient world government may secure their cooperation in the long run… We [scientists] have two clear-cut duties: to work on atomic energy and to work for world government which alone can give us freedom and peace.”

The extreme swings in Edward Teller's outlook remain somewhat mysterious. The British theoretician Freeman Dyson, then one of Teller's students, wrote his family from postwar Chicago that his teacher, whom he liked and admired, was nevertheless “a good example of the saying that no man is so dangerous as an idealist.” The emotional timbre of Teller's Chicago-period writing differs notably from his later work. It is less choleric and more optimistic, of course, but a deeper difference is that it is informed by a much greater degree of trust in his fellow man and in the possibility that human institutions might serve to restrain the conflicts of nations. Even Russia became, for a time, “this fabulous monster,” not the threatening presence Teller described to Bethe in 1945 and would invoke with increasing urgency in the years after 1949: “World government,” he wrote in the Bulletin as late as July 1948, “is our only hope for survival… I believe that we should cease to be infatuated with the menace of this fabulous monster, Russia. Our present necessary task of opposing Russia should not cause us to forget that in the long run we cannot win by working against something. We must work for something. We must work for World Government.” The reasons for this difference of attitude must be partly personal and inaccessible, perhaps even to the man himself. But it would appear from subsequent events that a crucial reason for Teller's sense of security in the immediate postwar years was America's sole possession of the atomic bomb.

But hardly anyone was listening. The Cold War had begun in earnest. Oppenheimer had found his way into the high councils of government; now director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and chairman of the scientific General Advisory Committee of the newly established U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, he was internationally famous, a household name. A plaintive footnote in a 1948 Teller Bulletin review of the first year's work of the Atomic Energy Commission reveals the Hungarian physicist's isolation from power in those days: “Due to the limited experience of the author the account is necessarily incomplete.”

In the early summer of 1949 Teller returned to Los Alamos on leave of absence from Chicago. He did not easily wrench himself away. Oppenheimer had sought him out and encouraged him; Bradbury had then sent a delegation that included Stanislaw Ulam to invite him back. He said later he went because he had decided that his writing, public speaking and political action were less than productive and that “the best contribution I could make would be to go back to Los Alamos to help develop weapons — something I knew about and that could yield concrete results.” He was undoubtedly influenced by the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia in the winter of 1948, by the blockade of Berlin that began the following summer and by the impending Communist victory over Nationalist forces in China. A more personal challenge was the fate of Hungary, which had briefly experienced democratic government once more as a republic under the protection of the Allied Control Commission. But the Red Army remained in occupation and by 1948 the Communist Party had maneuvered itself into power. A one-slate election on May 15, 1949, finished the job. Teller's father, mother, sister and nephew had survived the destruction of Hungarian Jewry and still lived in Budapest. Now they were cut off from him.

Teller was thus back at weapons work when Harry Truman announced, on September 23, 1949, the explosion of Joe I, the first Soviet atomic bomb. Like most Americans, Teller had not expected the Soviet success so soon. He called Oppenheimer on the day the Soviet test was announced in a state of arousal sufficient to cause Oppenheimer to advise him sharply, “Keep your shirt on.” He testified later that his mind “did not immediately turn in the direction of working on the thermonuclear bomb,” but in fact he discussed that prospect intensely at Los Alamos early in October with Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez, who encouraged him. The American nuclear monopoly had ended. The fabulous monster had real claws. If the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb, could a Soviet hydrogen bomb be far behind? Teller decided that the only possible hope for continued national security was an all-out American effort to build the Super.

The first concrete act of the United States government in response to the Soviet Union's demonstrated mastery of explosive fission was to approve, in October 1949, a program to expand the production of uranium and plutonium. In the meantime a secret debate raged within the government: what should the United States do? Herbert York, at the time a Teller prot6g6, describes the debate's constituents:

Especially considering the enormity of the issue — and most of those involved were fully aware of its enormity — the participants in the secret debate were very few: the members of the GAC [the AEC's General Advisory Committee], the members of the AEC and a few of their staff, the members of the [Senate and House Joint Committee on Atomic Energy] and a few of their staff, a very few top officials in the Defense Department, and