Kenneth Ford - Building the H Bomb

He was subpoenaed on April 21, 1949 and testified five weeks later on May 25. {7}

Its first meeting was on September 25, 1948. {11}

Founded in 1945 as the Federation of Atomic Scientists.

Goudsmit is best known to the public for his leadership of the Alsos mission, which, in late 1944, followed troops into France and Germany and discovered that German scientists had made little progress toward an atomic bomb. He is best known to physicists as the co-discoverer of electron spin and the long-time editor of journals of the American Physical Society.

A year earlier, in 1950, Princeton had decided not to retain Robert Hofstadter as a physics faculty member. He moved to Stanford University and in 1961 won the Nobel Prize for his work there on the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Failing to win tenure at Princeton is the best thing that ever happened to Hofstadter.

Although not a change of car. Our sleeper was disconnected from the Pennsylvania Railroad Broadway Limited and connected to the Santa Fe Chief or Super Chief for departure a few hours later.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that some of the energy released in one place is carried by neutrons to some other place. By contrast, in chemical combustion, all of the energy released in one place is deposited at that place.

Sumner Pike, an original Commissioner appointed in 1946; Gordon Dean, Chair, and Harry Smyth, both appointed in 1949; and T. Keith Glennan and Thomas Murray, both appointed in 1950.

In the previous summer, when Garwin and I overlapped in Los Alamos, he had paid me a compliment by being surprised that I was still a student.

The last meeting of the Family Committee for which minutes are preserved took place in June 1951. The first official meeting of the Theoretical Megaton Group took place in late September or early October 1951. {8}

When working at Los Alamos, I turned down every invitation to see an actual bomb or mockup of a bomb. I didn’t want the wires and bolts and plates to intrude upon my visualization of perfect cylinders and perfect spheres. I thought that seeing the real thing might make me less effective as a designer.

Both of the two cited references in note 12 say that the central axial cavity in the spark plug contained tritium gas. Tritium alone would not have been helpful. It must have been a DT mixture as in boosted weapons.

The Williams tube was invented by the British electronics engineer Frederic C. Williams. {2} The invention is sometimes attributed to both Williams and Tom Kilburn and accordingly is known also as the Williams-Kilburn tube.

Rosenbluth mimicked Garwin in precocity. He finished high school at 15, earned his Harvard bachelor’s degree at 19, and finished his Chicago Ph.D. at 22. {4} Teller was successful in bringing him to Los Alamos in 1950, where he remained for six years. Like Stan Ulam, he found the mixture of applied and pure research to his liking, and continued that balance at General Atomics before joining academia. His later honors included the National Medal of Science in 1997. He died in 2003. {5}

The other three are Edward Frieman, who became a professor of astrophysics at Princeton and later director of the Scripps Institute (he died in 2013); John McIntosh, who became a professor of physics at Wesleyan University; and H. Pierre Noyes, later a professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. We were all in our twenties when we worked at Matterhorn.

Also called TX-V, according to Richard Rhodes. {13}

According to Rhodes’s even more dramatic account, the new core arrive at Enewetak “a few days before the target date.” {13}

From 1946 to 1958, there were an additional two dozen tests on Bikini atoll (two hundred miles east of Enewetak and also part of the Marshall Islands). A long history of relocation and resettlement of native people on the islands is a dismal chapter in American history. {2}

To be exact, it was at 7:14:59 local time—a hundredth of a second before 7:15 a.m.—on November 1, 1952, or 19:14:59 on October 31 expressed in what was then called Greenwich Mean Time and is now called Universal Time, or Zulu Time. {3}

Gordon Dean, then Chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, also focused on this measure of Mike’s muscle when, in briefing President Truman the day after Mike, he reportedly said “The shot island of Elugelab is missing.” {7} (Other reports have Dean saying essentially the same thing to President-Elect Eisenhower later in November. {8} )

About 4,950 great-circle miles, or 4,600 straight-line miles through the Earth. The speed of the leading wave was about 5 miles per second.

What a tribute to the experimental physicists and engineers that they can figure the energy output of such a maelstrom to 1 percent.

Which, to this day, holds the record for energy release in a single explosion.

Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Slovenia, South Africa, and Sweden.

Utt, representing the conservative district in Southern California where I lived and where UC Irvine was established, was notable for his consistent opposition to civil rights legislation and to America’s membership in the United Nations. (He was, however, politically a bit to the left of his successor, the John Birch Society activist John Schmitz.)

My last child was born that summer in Los Alamos, in the same hospital where my first child had been born eleven years earlier. As I mentioned in Chapter 7, my wife and I and our brood of children lived that summer in a Bathtub Row house with the Ulams as our next-door neighbors.