Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [50]
Even the optimistic Spitzer gave up his dreams of a quick and cheap path to fusion energy with a Stellarator. In the early 1950s, he had thought that his small model-A and model-B Stellarators would lead quickly to a bigger, model-C machine that would serve “partly as a research facility, partly as a prototype or pilot plant for a full-scale power producing reactor.” Spitzer was fairly certain that he would be within sight of a working fusion power plant by the end of the decade. Then, setback after setback sapped his optimism. By the late 1950s, he viewed the $24 million model-C Stellarator then under construction “entirely as a research facility, without any regard for problems of a prototype.”41 Spitzer no longer saw fusion energy as within his grasp; a pilot plant was many generations of machines away.
It was a difficult time for fusion physics. Even the successes of Sherwood, such as Scylla’s first sighting of thermonuclear neutrons, were not showing a path to a working reactor. Making matters worse, the Atomic Energy Commission’s budget, which had skyrocketed through the 1950s, stopped growing, and the fusion research budget itself began to pinch.
These difficulties bred a measure of hope for magnetic fusion. Perhaps because the goal of a fusion reactor was so far out of reach, all the nations working on fusion energy decided to share their knowledge. The stakes had been lowered; there was no obvious path leading to limitless energy, so there was no harm in international collaboration. At the 1958 UN conference, the shroud of secrecy finally lifted from the fusion reactor programs around the world. Not only did American and British physicists have permission to lecture about the work they had done over the past decade, so, too, did their Russian counterparts. And behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet physicists had been doing some extraordinarily good work. The West soon learned of an idea that came from Russia’s version of Edward Teller: Andrei Sakharov.
Sakharov was a little more than a decade younger than Teller, so he was still a student when World War II erupted. He built a wartime reputation by working on conventional, not nuclear, munitions. He came up with a clever method to use electric and magnetic fields to detect defective armor-piercing shells, a vast improvement over the backbreaking work of snapping random shells in half to see whether they were properly manufactured. As the war was ending, Sakharov returned to school to get a graduate degree in physics, thinking he had escaped his weapon-engineering days. But on August 7, 1945, he was drawn back to military work.
On his way to the local bakery, Sakharov happened to glance at a newspaper. It told of the destruction of Hiroshima. “I was so stunned,” he wrote, “that my legs practically gave way.... Something new and awe-some had entered our lives, a product of the greatest of the sciences, of the discipline I revered.” The cloud of the atom bomb began to mushroom over his studies. As Sakharov tried to concentrate on theoretical physics, those mysterious secret cities began to spring up across the nation. His mentor, Igor Tamm, was secretly getting involved in Russia’s nuclear program. By 1948, Sakharov had been drawn into a project to design fusion weapons (the atom bomb problem having already been worked out, in part, thanks to the spying of Klaus Fuchs).
Sakharov immediately came up with his “first idea,” a design for a thermonuclear weapon. This design, the sloika bomb, was almost identical to the layered Alarm Clock design that Teller discarded as impractical in 1946. Though the sloika had the same problems as the Alarm Clock—megaton-size weapons