Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [13]
In the Marshall Islands, isolated in deep Pacific waters, a nearly circular atoll of a few dozen islands had been drafted into the Cold War effort. Since 1948, the United States had used the Eniwetok atoll—some of whose islands were inhabited—for testing nuclear weapons. In April 1951, a new series of tests began. They were code-named Greenhouse.
Greenhouse consisted of four explosions. The first two, Dog and Easy, tested two of the compact fission weapon designs that Los Alamos was furiously generating to keep the United States one step ahead of the Russians. The third and fourth, George and Item, were entirely different. They were the world’s first fusion devices.
Greenhouse George was a curious gadget. It wasn’t a design that could ever be dropped on an enemy. It was an enormous cylindrical device with a hole in the center. As the device imploded, radiation would stream out of the hole and strike a small target filled with a few grams of deuterium and tritium. It was a science experiment, not a practical weapon, something with which to study the process of fusion rather than to drop on a city. After all, scientists had never achieved fusion before; Greenhouse George, if it worked, would allow them to see it up close for the first time.
It worked. On May 9, Teller, slathered in suntan lotion, watched as a mushroom cloud boiled obscenely into the sky. It was a doozy of an explosion: at 225 kilotons it was a record breaker, an order of magnitude bigger than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. George’s fission bomb probably generated about 200 kilotons’ worth of energy. The remaining 25 kilotons came from the tiny capsule of deuterium and tritium. Scientists had finally unleashed the energy of the sun. Fusing a few grams of hydrogen released the same amount of energy as the fission of many kilograms of plutonium or uranium. And Greenhouse Item, the first test of a fission weapon “boosted” by a little dollop of deuterium and tritium at its center, was also a success. Teller’s dream of a weapon of unlimited power was back on track. “Eniwetok would not be large enough for the next one,” he gloated.
The next month, Teller and some colleagues met in Princeton to report on their success to Oppenheimer’s GAC. The resistance to the fusion bomb—moral and political—crumbled under the evidence provided by the Greenhouse tests. Even Teller admitted that Oppenheimer was enthusiastic about proceeding. “I expected that the General Advisory Committee, and particularly Dr. Oppenheimer, would further oppose the development [of the hydrogen bomb],” Teller would later testify. But after hearing about the Teller-Ulam design and the results of the Greenhouse tests, “Dr. Oppenheimer warmly supported this new approach.” The GAC endorsed a full-scale test of a superbomb.12 Nevertheless, Teller saw opposition to the hydrogen bomb everywhere, and Oppenheimer—Teller’s Moriarty—was almost certainly behind it all.
Teller’s return to Los Alamos should have been triumphant after the success of the Greenhouse tests. Norris Bradbury took the fusion project off its hold and formally started a thermonuclear weapons research program at Los Alamos. The project for the Super was officially back on track. But even this victory contained a defeat. Once again, Teller was passed over—he wasn’t appointed the head of the new program. Instead, Bradbury appointed Marshall Holloway, a theoretician. Teller considered Holloway a member of Oppenheimer’s clique who “had created difficulties in connection with the hydrogen bomb at every turn.” It was a slap in the face, and Teller was horrified to see Holloway and Bradbury dragging their feet on the date of the full-scale test. Teller wanted to see it happen in July 1952; Bradbury and Holloway thought a summer date was too optimistic and scheduled it for later in the year. A week after Holloway’s accession, Teller quit. On November 1, 1951, he stormed out of Los Alamos. He hoped to take his fusion program with him.
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