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designs for a fusion bomb. One was made out of alternating layers of fissionable heavy atoms and fusionable light atoms. Dubbed the “Alarm Clock” design (because it would wake the world to the prospect of fusion weapons), it had a serious drawback. To make it more and more powerful, designers had to add layer after layer to the bomb. By the time it reached the megaton range, it was too big to deliver. It was not a practical superweapon. It did not promise the unlimited power that Teller was seeking. Neither did his other suggestion. Teller realized that by adding a tiny bit of tritium to the center of an exploding fission warhead, the tritium would fuse and “boost” the yield of the atom bomb. This was a practical idea—and it ultimately did work—but it was just a way of making a slightly better fission weapon. It was far from the thermonuclear fusion superbomb that Teller had promised.

Teller kept up a brave face in public. He tried to recruit scientists to come to Los Alamos to work on fusion weapons. “The holiday is over,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Hydrogen bombs will not produce themselves.” However, Teller was fresh out of ideas. Neither the Alarm Clock nor boosted bombs provided the unlimited-power weapons Teller—or Truman—wanted. The crash program was stalling even before it started.

World politics made the situation dire. On June 25, North Korean soldiers marched across the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea. Seoul fell within days. And within two weeks, General Douglas MacArthur was figuring out how best to use nuclear bombs in the conflict. The battle went back and forth. Then, in November, soon after China entered the war, Truman threatened the use of atomic weapons. MacArthur asked for the discretion to use them on the battlefield. The world seemed on the brink of nuclear war.10 The fusion bomb, the weapon that was supposed to restore America’s military advantage, was nowhere to be found.

By the autumn of 1950, Teller was desperate. “He proposed a number of complicated schemes to save [the Super], none of which seemed to show much promise,” wrote Bethe. “It was evident that he did not know of any solution.” The head of Los Alamos, Norris Bradbury, a man whom Teller viewed as an ally of Oppenheimer’s, halted design work on the Super until some important tests, scheduled for early 1951, could be run. Teller was furious at the delay. He was at the brink of despair when Bradbury wrote a report summarizing the project for the GAC, Oppenheimer’s advisory committee. In Teller’s eyes “his report was focused on the Super and was so negative that it seemed an outright attempt to squash the project.” Teller and John Archibald Wheeler, a theoretical physicist and fusion hawk, wrote a second report “in a very different tone” to counteract Bradbury’s negativity. But there was little way to put a positive spin on the status of the Super. The project was dead in the water. The deuterium wouldn’t ignite. Teller was devastated. The unlimited power of fusion was slipping away.

Ironically, it was Ulam, the man who brought Teller to tears, who would lift him out of his despair. Ulam saw a way to build a working fusion weapon. In January 1951, he realized that he could use the stream of particles coming off an atom bomb to compress the hydrogen fuel, making it hot and dense enough to ignite in a fusion reaction.11 Instead of a simple bomb with a tank of deuterium, the new hydrogen bomb would have an atom bomb primary separated from a deuterium-tritium secondary. Particles from the atom bomb—radiation that would ordinarily stream away from the explosion—could be focused onto the secondary to compress, heat, and ignite it. It would be tricky to engineer such a device, but it seemed to overcome the problems that dogged the classical Super. “Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities,” Ulam reported to von Neumann. “This is perhaps an indication they will not work.” Nevertheless, the enthusiasm was justified. It would mark the end of the dark times for the fusion hawks, and for Teller. By May,