Although Lawrence was quick to offer an apology, Teller informed Sproul that he intended to return to Chicago.74 “I am extremely unhappy about the discharge of three theoretical physicists from the University,” Edward wrote to McMillan. “I feel embarrassed to be in a position where I am, in effect, taking their place.”75
Birge, however, reassured the university president that there was ultimately more of expediency than principle behind Teller’s decision. The oath, he told Sproul, was “not the real reason for [Teller’s] resignation but simply a polite way of getting out of a situation which had not turned out as he thought it would.”76
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In Washington, the anxiety over atom spies had meanwhile climbed to a fever pitch.77 Following the disclosure of Fuchs’s treason, the assumptions that had guided U.S. policy in the time of monopoly were turned on their head. What had hitherto been considered a major weakness for the Soviets—their lack of access to high-grade uranium ore—had actually turned out to be an advantage, a memo from the Military Liaison Committee argued, since it had forced the Russians to adopt more efficient production methods and had even pushed them early on to investigate the Super. Accordingly, Russia’s atomic stockpile might already be “equal or actually superior to our own,” the Pentagon speculated, while a Soviet Super “may be in actual production.”78
At first reluctant to endorse Nichols’s plea for the hydrogen bomb, by month’s end the joint chiefs, too, were calling for an “all-out” effort on the Super—even if it meant a slowdown in the production of atomic bombs.
Shown the MLC memo and the chiefs’ recommendation by Johnson, Truman issued a secret executive order on March 10, 1950, declaring the superbomb project “a matter of the highest urgency,” and approving production of up to ten H-bombs a year.79
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At Los Alamos, there remained some doubt the weapon that the president had just ordered into production could ever be built. One theoretical physicist working on the hydrogen bomb characterized it as “pure fantasy from the design standpoint, as well as a very difficult delivery problem.”80 The hypothetical Super under consideration was some 30 feet long and a stunning 162 feet wide; the fission trigger alone weighed 30,000 pounds.81 Another problem facing air force planners was how any aircraft dropping the bomb could escape the shock wave from the mammoth 1,000-megaton explosion. LeBaron was looking into flying drones as well as robot-guided ships and submarines.82
To Teller, the most troublesome unknown concerned the amount of scarce and expensive tritium that a superbomb would require. His “best guesses” in 1946 had ranged between 300 and 600 grams. The neutrons necessary to create that much tritium could make the plutonium for up to twenty fission bombs—a point that the GAC had tried, in vain, to bring to the attention of decision makers.83
But the “Daddy Pocketbook,” a top-secret précis of Teller’s lectures on the Super, published in early January before the president’s H-bomb decision, predicted that a successful Super would use no more than 100 grams of tritium and could be shrunk to 5,000 pounds—small and light enough to be carried on the nose of prospective long-range rockets. Truman’s approval of the crash effort had been based on the imaginary bomb envisioned in Teller’s “Pocketbook.”84
Hoping to narrow these varying estimates, the Weapons Development Committee at Los Alamos had begun calculating the burning of tritium and deuterium in a theoretical Super that winter. The effort was frustrated by the quirks and dubious reliability of the lab’s digital computer, designed by von Neumann and dubbed the MANIAC. (Technicians sometimes resorted to whacking the machine with a rubber mallet, to see if it gave the same result on a second run.) Frustrated by the delays, Ulam and a mathematician colleague at the lab, Cornelius Everett, undertook the same task using slide rules, mechanical calculators, and paper and pencil.85
Ulam and Everett discovered that the prospects for success were “miserable”—unless considerably more tritium were added.86 They calculated that the necessary tritium ranged from 3 to 5 kilograms. Even so, Ulam reported that the “result of the calculations seems to be that the model considered is a fizzle.”87 Assuming a thermonuclear fire could be lit in the tritium, Ulam and Everett found, the flame failed to spread down the deuterium and tritium-filled tube. Princeton’s computer confirmed their findings a few weeks later.88 “Icicles are forming,” von Neumann telephoned Ulam dejectedly.89
Teller’s response to this news, Ulam recalled, was to turn “pale with fury.” (Oppenheimer, on the other hand, seemed “rather glad to learn of the difficulties,” Ulam noted.)90
Hoping in part to placate Teller, Bradbury in early March put the lab on a six-day workweek, making Edward head of a new group of two dozen scientists at the lab. The so-called Family Committee got its name from the various nicknames—“Sonny,” “Little Edward,” “Uncle” assigned superbombs of competing design. Teller’s so-called tetraton Super, 100 cubic meters of uncompressed liquid deuterium, was known as “the daddy of them all.”91
Stymied on the Super, the Family Committee turned its attention back to the Alarm Clock. Acknowledging that seemingly insurmountable barriers still blocked that path as well, Teller reluctantly recommended that a choice between the two designs be postponed once again.92
With a GAC review of the superbomb program planned for the fall, Teller and the Family Committee that summer approved an experiment meant to show that the lab was making tangible progress toward its
