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’s wife found him gazing out the window one afternoon ‘with a very strange expression on his face’. When she asked what he was thinking, he replied: ‘I found a way to make it work.’ His idea was to create compression at the enormous heart of the Super, thereby pushing nuclei closer to each other and causing a faster burning of fuel and a greater production of heat. The fission explosion of the initiating device would release X-rays that would in turn cause compression of the thermonuclear material (this was Teller’s contribution). Substituting radiation for blast to implode the thermonuclear fuel, now separated from the fission bomb initiator, would provide the speed necessary to ensure that heat was produced rather than lost. ‘This is how you make a hydrogen bomb,’ said Teller proudly soon after his meeting of minds with Ulam, sketching on the blackboard the new, ‘two-stage’ implosion sequence. At that moment, recalled physicist Herbert York, ‘I realized: That was it.’ Even Oppenheimer, so wary of bigger bombs, so skeptical of the feasibility of building the Super, would admit: ‘When I saw how to do it, it was clear to me that one had at least to make the thing.. .The program in 1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that.’ Development now moved forward. The Americans built a hydrogen bomb called ‘Mike’ (or ‘The Sausage’, after its shape) that weighed 60 metric tons. The test shot took place on 1 November 1952 at the south Pacific coral atoll of Eniewetok, liberated from the Japanese in early 1944. The blast produced a fireball 3 miles wide— ‘You would swear that the whole world was on fire,’ wrote a sailor who witnessed it—a mushroom cloud that blotted the sky, and a sea-water-filled crater 200 feet deep and over a mile across where the island of Elugelab had been. Mike was 1,000 times more powerful than Little Boy had been.51

Beria panicked and demanded that Soviet scientists increase their pace; they now worked, according to Kurchatov’s secretary, ‘as if American bombs would start raining down on them in a month or two’. The Soviets had technical problems of their own to solve; Kurchatov and Beria pushed them, the latter not gently. The Layer Cake design proved sound, and deuterium and tritium were gradually produced in sufficient quantities to yield a thermonuclear reaction. Their goal was to make a horrible but deliverable H-bomb, unlike the unwieldy Mike a weapon that could conceivably be used against an enemy. Stalin’s death in early March 1953 and Beria’s arrest on 26 June—the scientists at Sarov learned about Beria when one morning the signs denoting ‘Beria Street’ had been taken down—did not slow the process. There was an eleventh-hour glitch when Kurchatov realized that the Semipalatinsk test site, which was to be used again, was surrounded by inhabitants whose homes might be reached by fallout from the H-bomb’s blast. An evacuation plan was hastily put into effect, and thousands of people were sent away, without explanation, some as late as the eve of the test shot. At dawn on 12 August 1953 Kurchatov started the countdown. The blast nearly knocked the scientists off their feet, exceeding their fondest expectations for power and effect. Awesome as they had been, ‘the effects of the first atomic bomb had not inspired such flesh-creeping terror’, wrote one scientist afterward. Oppenheimer had rescued a turtle after the Trinity test eight years earlier. At Semipalatinsk, birds that had taken flight with the bomb’s flash twitched on the ground, ‘their wings scorched and their eyes burned out’.52

7. The arms race and nuclear diversity

What followed was, if not inevitable, nevertheless entirely predictable. The ‘arms race’, as it came to be known, meant that every new weapon tested by one side was interpreted by the other as a challenge to be met. Thus, the Soviet test was followed, on 1 March 1954, by an American test of a deliverable hydrogen bomb, on Bikini. Fallout from this shot, codenamed Bravo, was greater than the Americans had expected, and a cloud of radioactivity settled over