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By Root 1280 0

Truman wanted the Super. What happened, ultimately, was that the Joint Chiefs grew impatient over the GAC’s placidity and the evident divisions on the Z Committee. In mid-January they wrote to Johnson endorsing the Super, calling it ‘foolhardy altruism’ to suppose that the Soviets would fail to build a hydrogen bomb if the Americans renounced theirs. Johnson forwarded this memo to the President without showing it to the Committee. ‘And that’, writes Richard Rhodes, ‘was that.’ Truman read the JCS memo and told Sidney Souers, director of the NSC, that the Chiefs’ proposal ‘made a lot of sense and that he was inclined to think that was what we should do’. The Z Committee met Truman on the last day of January 1950 and recommended that the United States try to establish the ‘feasibility’ of the Super. Lilienthal took the floor to dissent; Truman cut him off after a few minutes: ‘What the hell are we waiting for? Let’s get on with it.’ It was, Lilienthal remarked ruefully, like saying ‘ “No” to a steamroller’. Later that day Truman announced that the AEC was ‘to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb’. The President’s phrasing elided any differences between fission and thermonuclear weapons—both types coexisted under the rubric ‘all forms’—in much the same way that American strategists had allowed themselves to imagine that using atomic bombs on Japanese cities was no different from using firebombs, which practice seemed to have been accepted by all the belligerents. Four days after making his decision, Truman told an aide that ‘there was actually no decision to be made on the H-bomb... We had to do it—make the [H-]bomb—though no one wants to use it. But,’ he said, ‘we have got to have it if only for bargaining purposes with the Russians.’46

Once more, the lights came on at Los Alamos, and another massive effort of physics and engineering began. Teller would have his day, at last. He had difficulty getting other scientists to rejoin him in the desert: many were busy elsewhere, while others had moral reasons to avoid building the Super. Teller faced serious design problems. Another scientist had helpfully suggested using not deuterium but tritium to create a thermonuclear reaction; tritium is radioactive hydrogen 3 (that is, with one proton and two neutrons in its nucleus), and it requires a much lower ignition temperature than deuterium. But tritium was rare, and for the effort needed to make enough for an H-bomb one could manufacture enough plutonium for twenty fission weapons. When analysts drew plans for Teller’s Super, the result more closely resembled a house than a bomb: 30 feet long, 162 feet wide, with an imbedded fission core weighing 30,000 pounds and craving much more tritium than Teller had earlier estimated. No existing plane could carry it; it might have to be delivered to its target aboard a warship, presumably unmanned. If a way could be found to use the weapon, especially by dropping it, somehow, from the sky, it was likely to destroy everything within a 1,000-square-mile radius ‘by shock’, and inflict burns at an astonishing distance of 100 miles from ground zero. The morality of such a bomb remained, for obvious reasons, an issue. So did its utility.47

By 1949 the Russians had been working seriously to make a hydrogen bomb for over three years. The Russian decision may have been prompted by material on American thinking about the Super provided by Klaus Fuchs. The German-born spy had in April 1946 attended a conference on the Super at Los Alamos, and Soviet scientists, including Yakov Zeldovich, who had explored chain reactions with Yuli Khariton, read Fuchs’s report ofthis meeting with care. But the Soviets had already begun to speculate on how fusion might be generated. Given the rudimentary state of American thinking about the Super, Fuchs could not have managed more than to signal to his employers that there was American interest in the subject; to have pursued to any length American theorizing at that stage would have left Russian physicists on