Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [10]
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