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elements. But if fusion can’t fuse nuclei to get atoms heavier than iron, where do we get gold and lead and uranium from? It turns out that they are created in the very final moments of a star’s life. As the star explodes, the explosion is so hot and so violent that heavy nuclei are colliding with protons, neutrons, and other particles with great force. Sometimes, the particles stick, making the nucleus bigger. This process absorbs energy rather than releasing it—it’s like rolling the ball up the shallow side of the hill—but it happens because the explosion is so energetic. It is from the very last moments of a supernova that we get all the elements heavier than those in the iron group.

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A fusion reaction that isn’t properly compressed becomes a big, expensive dud. In weaponeers’ terminology, the bomb “fizzles.” Livermore’s first nuclear tests fizzled, including its first hydrogen bomb test, Castle Koon.

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While fusion hawks like Teller and Strauss led the push to turn weaponry into something to benefit mankind, even the scientists on the other side of the hydrogen bomb divide—those who opposed the development of the Super—pushed to turn nuclear knowledge into a boon for humanity. “I had a hand in formulating and popularizing that hope of peaceful potentials,” wrote the former AEC chairman (and Oppenheimer ally) David Lilienthal. “The basic cause, I think was a conviction, and one that I shared fully, and tried to inculcate in others, that somehow or other the discovery that had produced so terrible a weapon simply had to have an important peaceful use.”

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Taylor had less peaceful uses in mind, too. The neutrons generated by an exploding fusion bomb buried under the ice could generate oodles of tritium; such a bomb exploded over a blanket of uranium could manufacture all the plutonium that the defense industry could possibly need.

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He would not be the last, nor would Castle Bravo be the only fusion “oops.” When the Soviets detonated their first Ulam-Teller-type device in 1955, a temperature inversion in the atmosphere reflected the shockwave back to the ground, causing a tremendous amount of damage. A Russian soldier died when his trench collapsed, and in a nearby settlement a two-year-old girl, who had been playing with blocks, was killed when the shockwave smashed the bomb shelter she was in.

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Despite the bad press, some scientists involved with the project were glib. A month after the accident they dubbed a draft plan to return the evacuated islanders to their home Project Hardy, as in Thomas Hardy, who wrote The Return of the Native.

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Pauling received his second Nobel Prize—the peace prize—for his efforts to warn the world about the danger of fallout. In his presentation speech for Pauling’s award, the chairman of the Nobel committee noted, “The opposition Pauling encountered came first of all from two scientists, E. Teller and W. F. Libby, of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.”

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At a secret 1955 meeting Libby proposed a particularly gruesome way to get samples to measure strontium-90 concentrations: “So human samples are of prime importance,” he said, “and if if [sic] anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.”

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Teller’s arguments defending nuclear testing ranged from the disingenuous to the downright outrageous. At one point he attacked scientists who had the temerity to suggest that fallout-caused mutations might be a bad thing: “Deploring the mutations that may be caused by fallout is somewhat like adopting the policies of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who approve of a past revolution but condemn future reforms.”

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There was no evidence for this. Teller was consistently (and unreasonably) pessimistic about the ability to detect Soviet nuclear tests underground and in space, a striking contrast to his consistent optimism about fusion weapons and his other nuclear schemes.

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The United States accused the Soviet Union of reneging on its word. The USSR, on the other hand, had declared that the moratorium would only be