Sun in a Bottle Read online

  It wasn’t the response that Teller hoped for. He thought his Super provided an easy answer to the crisis. By developing a superbomb more powerful than even atomic weapons, the United States could keep its lead over the Soviet Union. But some scientists viewed pursuing fusion weapons as an inherently immoral act, one that might lead to the destruction of humanity. Physicists began to divide into two groups: pro- and anti-fusion.

  Oppenheimer was in the latter camp. A month after Truman’s announcement, Oppenheimer convened a meeting of a handful of scientists, politicians, and engineers—the General Advisory Committee (GAC)—who advised the new Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The AEC had been formed in 1945 to oversee nuclear research, so the GAC, chaired by Oppenheimer, was extremely influential in setting the direction of America’s nuclear weapons program. Oppenheimer’s GAC was firmly anti-fusion. While the committee stated that it would be wise to increase the United States’ capacity to build and research nuclear weapons, the GAC raised technical questions about the feasibility of the Super—and also made a firm statement about the morality of pursuing Teller’s dream of weapons of unlimited power. “We are all agreed that it would be wrong at the present moment to commit ourselves to an all-out effort toward its development.” Some scientists on the committee went further. Oppenheimer and five others railed against the morality of a fusion weapons program. “A super bomb might become a weapon of genocide,” they wrote. “We believe a super bomb should never be produced.” To Enrico Fermi and fellow physicist Isidor Rabi, also on the committee, Oppenheimer’s statement didn’t go far enough. “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole,” they argued. “It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” The GAC recommended shelving the Super project.

  To Teller, who had returned to Los Alamos full-time, Joe-1 was the realization of his worst fears. A militant Communist state had just destroyed his home country; in August, Hungary officially declared itself Communist and became a satellite of the Soviet Union. And now the belligerent USSR was menacing his adopted home, the United States. Oppenheimer, with his Communist sympathies, was setting the United States on a course of self-destruction. Teller was certain that forsaking the Super, as Oppenheimer wanted, would ensure Soviet world domination within a few years. He had to thwart Oppenheimer’s destructive influence. Teller started to make his case directly to Congress, and the Oppenheimer-Teller war began in earnest.

  Teller had many allies also lobbying for the Super. A number of scientists and politicians agreed that an arms race with the Soviet Union was inevitable and thought that the Super was crucial to keeping the Soviets at bay. Lewis Strauss, a commissioner of the AEC, urged President Truman to launch a crash project to build a fusion weapon—even raising the specter that the Russians had taken the lead. The influential Berkeley physicists Luis Alvarez and Ernest Lawrence, too, stumped for a fusion bomb program. Congress was receptive to the fusion hawks’ arguments. When Teller traveled to Washington, he quickly found an ally in Brien McMahon, the chairman of the Senate’s Special Committee on Atomic Energy.

  Even before the nuclear ash from the Joe-1 test had dispersed, the battles were under way. Hans Bethe, after being approached by Teller, initially agreed to work on the fusion bomb. Shortly after talking to Oppenheimer, however, Bethe backed out. Teller blamed Oppenheimer for the reversal. And those on either side of the divide—the pro-fusion and anti-fusion camps—began to distrust and dislike each other.

  Teller and his allies looked upon Oppenheimer as an obstructionist and began to conclude that his actions damaged the military capability of the United States. Teller would later testify that Oppenheimer and his allies set back the fusion bomb effort by five years. The anti-fusion weapons side looked on with disgust as the hawks lobbied for the superweapon. For example, David Lilienthal, the first chairman of the AEC, was shaken by the “bloodthirsty” push for a fusion bomb. “The day has been filled, too, with talk about supers, single weapons capable of desolating a vast area,” Lilienthal wrote in his journal in October 1949. “Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez in here drooling over the same. Is this all we have to offer?” Teller’s image, too, suffered, as he pressed harder and harder for the Super. “Now I began to see a distorted human being, petty, perhaps nearly paranoid in his hatred of the Russians, and jealous in personal relationships,” wrote the Los Alamos physicist John Manley.

  The scientists battled about whether or not to pursue fusion weapons, and the fight worked its way up to the president. Truman deliberated. Would he back the Super project or not? The pressures were building. Anti-Communist hysteria was sweeping the country, and the populace would clamor for a fusion bomb if they knew it existed.

  They soon knew. On November 18, 1949, the Washington Post carried an alarming story on page 1. “[Scientists] are working and ‘have made considerable progress’ on ‘what is known as a super-bomb’ with ‘1000 times’ the effect of the Nagasaki weapon,” the article read. Soon, Truman was fielding questions at press conferences about the hydrogen bomb. The public clearly wanted a superweapon to counter the Soviet threat. The easy solution to the Russian problem—the Super—was becoming hard to resist. And then came the final blow.

  On January 27, 1950, British police arrested Los Alamos physicist Klaus Fuchs, who confessed to being a spy. All of a sudden it became clear why the Russians were able to build an atom bomb so quickly. Worse yet, Fuchs had been involved in discussions about the fusion bomb; in fact, he was coholder of a key secret patent having to do with the method used to ignite the first working hydrogen bombs. The Russians knew all about the fusion bomb—and they had likely already begun research. Truman felt he had little choice.

  Four days later, the president of the United States issued a public statement to his citizens. “It is part of my responsibility as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor,” it read. “Accordingly, I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.”

  Truman’s hand had been forced, but he had just made a dangerous decision. He had committed the United States to an arms race with the Soviet Union that would make both countries insecure and lead the world to the brink of destruction, all for the sake of a fusion weapon that, at the time, was merely a figment of Teller’s fertile imagination.

  Truman almost certainly didn’t know this, but when he made his announcement, the fusion project at Los Alamos was entering its darkest time. Just weeks before, calculations from Los Alamos were starting to prove that Teller’s fusion bomb was a flop.

  It was hard—damnably hard—to get enough light atoms hot enough and dense enough to create a hydrogen bomb. Teller, as a theorist, made his best guesses as to how to engineer such a device and estimate what was needed to get it to explode. However, theorists sometimes overlook little niggling practicalities that make the job harder than they originally imagine. Teller’s initial plans for the Super were little more than an atom bomb at one end of a tank of deuterium. The energy from the atom bomb would make the deuterium so hot that the atoms would slam together and stick, fusing and releasing energy. But Teller’s deuterium bomb ran into problems from the start. Even deuterium, which is much easier to fuse than ordinary hydrogen, would be hard to ignite. In 1942, mere months after Teller’s initial visions of the Super, scientists realized that a “hydrogen bomb” should have tritium, a still heavier version of hydrogen, mixed in with the deuterium if it was to have any chance of exploding. The problem is that tritium doesn’t occur much in nature; it has to be manufactured if you want a large quantity of it. And this process required the same resources—and was about as expensive—as manufacturing plutonium.

  Even though tritium was scarce, the unlimited power promised by the Super made it worth producing. According to Teller’s estimates
, it would require a few hundred grams of tritium—a significant, but manageable, amount of the rare substance—to get the Super working. Those estimates were wildly optimistic.

  In December 1949, the month before Truman’s fateful announcement, the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, along with his colleague, Cornelius Everett, began extremely tedious calculations to figure out whether, in fact, Teller’s Super would work. They worked with pencil and paper, slide rules, and a set of dice.9 With each roll of the dice, it became more and more evident that Teller’s Super would fail to ignite the tank of deuterium and tritium. Françoise Ulam, Stanislaw’s wife, noted how Teller reacted to the ever-worsening news. “Every day Stan would come into the office, look at our computations, and come back with new ‘guestimates,’ while Teller objected loudly and cajoled every one around into disbelieving the results,” she wrote. “What should have been the common examination of difficult problems became an unpleasant confrontation.” Ulam wrote that the calculations made Teller “pale with anger.” Ulam and Teller already disliked each other, and it was reported that Ulam “took real pleasure” in knocking down Teller’s pet project.

  By February, it was absolutely clear that the Super wouldn’t work. Instead of requiring a few hundred grams of tritium, the Ulam-Everett calculations implied that a Super would need ten times that—a few kilograms. There was no way the United States could manufacture that amount of tritium in a reasonable period of time. Teller’s device was impractical.

  “Teller was not easily reconciled to our results,” wrote Stanislaw Ulam years later. “I learned that the bad news drove him to tears of frustration.” Nevertheless, the calculations were solid. It was less than a month after Truman announced the superbomb project—and a month before Truman signed an executive order that officially jump-started the crash program. The Super design was crumbling in front of Teller’s eyes.

  Ulam and Fermi then put another nail in the coffin. Even with an enormous amount of tritium, they found, a pipe full of the stuff simply wouldn’t fuse. If you managed to ignite one end, the reaction would not travel down the pipe. “You can’t get cylindrical containers of deuterium to burn because the energy escapes faster than it reproduces itself,” explained the Los Alamos physicist Richard Garwin a number of years later. He added that “The classical Super could not work. . . . All the time [on the classical Super] was wasted. There had been miscalculation because Teller was optimistic.” After all the commotion and heartache, after the scientific community chose sides in a growing schism, the Super was a fizzle.

  The calculations suggested that the enemies of fusion were right all along. “[Teller] 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 be very incomplete,” wrote Hans Bethe years afterward.

  Teller persisted. He had already dreamed up alternate designs for a fusion bomb. One was made out of alternating layers of fissionable heavy atoms and fusionable light atoms. Dubbed the “Alarm Clock” design (because it would wake the world to the prospect of fusion weapons), it had a serious drawback. To make it more and more powerful, designers had to add layer after layer to the bomb. By the time it reached the megaton range, it was too big to deliver. It was not a practical superweapon. It did not promise the unlimited power that Teller was seeking. Neither did his other suggestion. Teller realized that by adding a tiny bit of tritium to the center of an exploding fission warhead, the tritium would fuse and “boost” the yield of the atom bomb. This was a practical idea—and it ultimately did work—but it was just a way of making a slightly better fission weapon. It was far from the thermonuclear fusion superbomb that Teller had promised.

  Teller kept up a brave face in public. He tried to recruit scientists to come to Los Alamos to work on fusion weapons. “The holiday is over,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Hydrogen bombs will not produce themselves.” However, Teller was fresh out of ideas. Neither the Alarm Clock nor boosted bombs provided the unlimited-power weapons Teller—or Truman—wanted. The crash program was stalling even before it started.

  World politics made the situation dire. On June 25, North Korean soldiers marched across the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea. Seoul fell within days. And within two weeks, General Douglas MacArthur was figuring out how best to use nuclear bombs in the conflict. The battle went back and forth. Then, in November, soon after China entered the war, Truman threatened the use of atomic weapons. MacArthur asked for the discretion to use them on the battlefield. The world seemed on the brink of nuclear war.10 The fusion bomb, the weapon that was supposed to restore America’s military advantage, was nowhere to be found.

  By the autumn of 1950, Teller was desperate. “He proposed a number of complicated schemes to save [the Super], none of which seemed to show much promise,” wrote Bethe. “It was evident that he did not know of any solution.” The head of Los Alamos, Norris Bradbury, a man whom Teller viewed as an ally of Oppenheimer’s, halted design work on the Super until some important tests, scheduled for early 1951, could be run. Teller was furious at the delay. He was at the brink of despair when Bradbury wrote a report summarizing the project for the GAC, Oppenheimer’s advisory committee. In Teller’s eyes “his report was focused on the Super and was so negative that it seemed an outright attempt to squash the project.” Teller and John Archibald Wheeler, a theoretical physicist and fusion hawk, wrote a second report “in a very different tone” to counteract Bradbury’s negativity. But there was little way to put a positive spin on the status of the Super. The project was dead in the water. The deuterium wouldn’t ignite. Teller was devastated. The unlimited power of fusion was slipping away.

  Ironically, it was Ulam, the man who brought Teller to tears, who would lift him out of his despair. Ulam saw a way to build a working fusion weapon. In January 1951, he realized that he could use the stream of particles coming off an atom bomb to compress the hydrogen fuel, making it hot and dense enough to ignite in a fusion reaction.11 Instead of a simple bomb with a tank of deuterium, the new hydrogen bomb would have an atom bomb primary separated from a deuterium-tritium secondary. Particles from the atom bomb—radiation that would ordinarily stream away from the explosion—could be focused onto the secondary to compress, heat, and ignite it. It would be tricky to engineer such a device, but it seemed to overcome the problems that dogged the classical Super. “Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities,” Ulam reported to von Neumann. “This is perhaps an indication they will not work.” Nevertheless, the enthusiasm was justified. It would mark the end of the dark times for the fusion hawks, and for Teller. By May, Los Alamos would have experimental data to back up the theoretical calculations.

  In the Marshall Islands, isolated in deep Pacific waters, a nearly circular atoll of a few dozen islands had been drafted into the Cold War effort. Since 1948, the United States had used the Eniwetok atoll—some of whose islands were inhabited—for testing nuclear weapons. In April 1951, a new series of tests began. They were code-named Greenhouse.

  Greenhouse consisted of four explosions. The first two, Dog and Easy, tested two of the compact fission weapon designs that Los Alamos was furiously generating to keep the United States one step ahead of the Russians. The third and fourth, George and Item, were entirely different. They were the world’s first fusion devices.

  Greenhouse George was a curious gadget. It wasn’t a design that could ever be dropped on an enemy. It was an enormous cylindrical device with a hole in the center. As the device imploded, radiation would stream out of the hole and strike a small target filled with a few grams of deuterium and tritium. It was a science experiment, not a practical weapon, something with which to study the process of fusion rather than to drop on a city. After all, scientists had never achieved fusion before; Greenhouse George, if it worked, would allow them to see it up close for the first time.

  It worked. On May 9, Teller, slathered in suntan lotion, wa
tched as a mushroom cloud boiled obscenely into the sky. It was a doozy of an explosion: at 225 kilotons it was a record breaker, an order of magnitude bigger than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. George’s fission bomb probably generated about 200 kilotons’ worth of energy. The remaining 25 kilotons came from the tiny capsule of deuterium and tritium. Scientists had finally unleashed the energy of the sun. Fusing a few grams of hydrogen released the same amount of energy as the fission of many kilograms of plutonium or uranium. And Greenhouse Item, the first test of a fission weapon “boosted” by a little dollop of deuterium and tritium at its center, was also a success. Teller’s dream of a weapon of unlimited power was back on track. “Eniwetok would not be large enough for the next one,” he gloated.

  The next month, Teller and some colleagues met in Princeton to report on their success to Oppenheimer’s GAC. The resistance to the fusion bomb—moral and political—crumbled under the evidence provided by the Greenhouse tests. Even Teller admitted that Oppenheimer was enthusiastic about proceeding. “I expected that the General Advisory Committee, and particularly Dr. Oppenheimer, would further oppose the development [of the hydrogen bomb],” Teller would later testify. But after hearing about the Teller-Ulam design and the results of the Greenhouse tests, “Dr. Oppenheimer warmly supported this new approach.” The GAC endorsed a full-scale test of a superbomb.12 Nevertheless, Teller saw opposition to the hydrogen bomb everywhere, and Oppenheimer—Teller’s Moriarty—was almost certainly behind it all.

  Teller’s return to Los Alamos should have been triumphant after the success of the Greenhouse tests. Norris Bradbury took the fusion project off its hold and formally started a thermonuclear weapons research program at Los Alamos. The project for the Super was officially back on track. But even this victory contained a defeat. Once again, Teller was passed over—he wasn’t appointed the head of the new program. Instead, Bradbury appointed Marshall Holloway, a theoretician. Teller considered Holloway a member of Oppenheimer’s clique who “had created difficulties in connection with the hydrogen bomb at every turn.” It was a slap in the face, and Teller was horrified to see Holloway and Bradbury dragging their feet on the date of the full-scale test. Teller wanted to see it happen in July 1952; Bradbury and Holloway thought a summer date was too optimistic and scheduled it for later in the year. A week after Holloway’s accession, Teller quit. On November 1, 1951, he stormed out of Los Alamos. He hoped to take his fusion program with him.