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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