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By Root 1402 0

a year, Teller, along with some of his hawkish allies, had been lobbying to create a second laboratory—one dedicated to thermonuclear fusion. Oppenheimer’s GAC consistently opposed the proposal, fearing that it would split the pool of talented physicists rather than keep them concentrated in one place. However, Teller’s behind-the-scenes lobbying had yielded some powerful allies, including high air force brass such as James Doolittle, who led the heroic first air raid on Tokyo in 1942. Rather than lose control of hydrogen bomb research to the military, the Atomic Energy Commission began to capitulate. Oppenheimer and the GAC still opposed the new laboratory, but Oppenheimer’s influence was waning. New members of the GAC were more hawkish than the ones they had replaced. Worse yet, Oppenheimer’s political enemies—Teller, Luis Alvarez, air force scientist David Griggs, AEC director of research Kenneth Pitzer, and GAC member Willard Libby—had been chatting with the FBI about Oppenheimer. Pitzer went so far as to publicly question Oppenheimer’s loyalty.

Oppenheimer’s critics had taken their toll. In June 1952, he stepped down from the GAC. The following month the AEC green-lighted the second laboratory, to be based at Livermore in California (and is today the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). Ironically, Teller was slighted yet again; he was surprised to hear that he wasn’t the director. After some arguing he signed up. “I am leaving the appeasers to join the fascists,” Teller reportedly joked.

Teller had won. Los Alamos now had a rival, and Teller had a facility that was free from the influence of Oppenheimer’s cronies, the Soviet appeasers, the Communist sympathizers. However, it was Los Alamos that would initiate the age of fusion.

At 7:14:59 AM on November 1, 1952, roughly a half second ahead of schedule, the island of Elugelab suddenly disappeared. A compact eighty-ton device, nicknamed “the sausage,” unleashed the power of the sun upon the Earth for a few moments. The fusion reaction from this device—the first hydrogen bomb—vaporized Elugelab. All that remained was a cloud of dust and fire that stretched twenty miles into the stratosphere.

The nuclear test, known as Ivy Mike, was the first test of a thermonuclear weapon. The Ulam-Teller design had paid off. The energy it produced was an astonishing ten megatons, fifty times bigger than the Greenhouse George shot and about the size of seven hundred Hiroshima bombs. Eniwetok atoll was now missing an island; Elugelab had evaporated under the cloud of fusing hydrogen, leaving behind a crater that could swallow fourteen buildings the size of the Pentagon.

Teller, the prime architect of the cataclysm, was half a world away. Having left Los Alamos, he was in a darkened room at Berkeley where a seismograph recorded the trembling of the Earth with a tiny beam of light. When that dot of light danced wildly, Teller knew he had succeeded. Ivy Mike had worked. Teller had created a weapon of virtually unlimited power. It was as if the United States had been handed the sword of Michael, the ultimate weapon.

It had taken too long. The Russians were already hot on the fusion trail. Shortly after World War II, all across the Soviet Union, mysterious secret cities began sprouting up. Among them: Arzamas-16, near Novgorod; Semipalatinsk-21 in Kazakhstan; Chelyabinsk-70 in the Ural Mountains. After decades of speculation and spying, we now know that these were the cities devoted to designing, testing, and building nuclear weapons. And in the early 1950s, the Soviets were progressing rapidly. Just weeks before Teller left Los Alamos, the third Russian test, Joe-3, yielded forty-two kilotons. Two years later, in August 1953, Joe-4 yielded more than four hundred kilotons. Again, American scientists were shocked. This bomb was more powerful than standard fission weapons—it was clearly a fusion device.

Russian scientists had come up with a design similar to the Alarm Clock idea, the very one that Teller had rejected as a dead end. It was still a dead end; there was no way the