Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [160]
The ‘superweapons’ of which Golden wrote had for years been a gleam in Teller’s eye. At Los Alamos, Teller had run afoul of fellow scientists by insisting that work be done on the creation of an awesomely powerful ‘Super’ bomb, in which a fission bomb would serve as a mere trigger for a far greater explosion. It was Enrico Fermi who imagined such a weapon in the fall of 1941. What if, Fermi asked Teller, a fission bomb was used to set off a larger device that would cause a thermonuclear reaction, similar in nature to the energy produced by the sun? Experiments existed to suggest that the intense heat generated by the fissioning might cause the fusion of two chemically light nucleii—in this case of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen with a neutron added to its proton
nucleus—into a nucleus of helium, which had two protons and one neutron. The offspring of this union would be an incredible burst of energy, its limit determined only by the amount of liquid deuterium fired by the fission bomb. In theory, Fermi calculated, 12 kilograms of deuterium would produce a blast equivalent to a million tons of TNT. A cubic meter of deuterium ought to make an explosion worth ten million tons.41
Teller’s near-obsessiveness about the Super at Los Alamos had been an annoyance. The focus of the Manhattan Project, thought Oppenheimer, must be a fission weapon, far less complicated than a hydrogen bomb (the Super’s less casual name) and thus more likely of attainment before the end of the war. He placated Teller as best he could, meeting him weekly to discuss whatever was on the Hungarian’s mind and promising him that the Super would have its day, after the group had succeeded in making a fission bomb. Teller took out his frustrations by banging away on his piano. Perhaps because Hiroshima and Nagasaki had changed him, or perhaps because he had never had much faith that a fusion bomb was practical or desirable, after the war Oppenheimer pulled away from his pledge to build the Super. In September 1945, writing for a Scientific Advisory Panel including Fermi, Arthur Compton, and Ernest Lawrence, Oppenheimer urged that the Super be temporarily shelved. Compton added, in a letter to Henry Wallace, that the Panel advised against going forward ‘primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use’. There was more than a hint here of ethical qualm. As most scientists left the mesa in the fall of 1945, Teller continued to work on the Super there, even writing a top-secret report titled ‘The Super Handbook’. But he felt isolated and dispirited. On 1 February 1946 he and his family headed for Chicago, where Edward had accepted a position at the university.42
The Soviet atomic-bomb test seemed to change the political and scientific climate overnight. Oppenheimer at first remained sanguine, unconvinced of the Super’s practicality. ‘I am not sure the miserable thing will work’, he wrote Conant, ‘nor that it can be gotten to a target except by ox-cart.’ He would later point out that, had the Americans had the Super in August 1945, they could not have used it over Hiroshima: the target was ‘too small’. Conant reinforced Oppenheimer by insisting that the H-bomb would be built only ‘over my dead body’. Hans Bethe agonized but decided against, Compton had enduring moral doubts, and David Lilienthal drew back in horror at the prospect of the Super: ‘Is this all we have to offer?’ he asked in despair. Berkeley’s Luis Alvarez and Ernest Lawrence joined Teller as enthusiasts for the new weapon; Lilienthal found their ‘drooling’ over the Super unseemly. The military leadership, not fully apprised of the Super,