Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In 1933 Gamow fled from Russia and was given a professorship at the George Washington University in the American capital. In 1935 Gamow invited the Hungarian refugee scientist Edward Teller to join him at George Washington. They worked together and talked a good deal about the problem of hydrogen fusion. After listening to them, another refugee, Hans Bethe, winner of the Enrico Fermi award in 1961, then at Cornell, worked out the now accepted equations for nuclear fusion on the sun. Bethe’s equations assumed that Carbon-12, by the addition of hydrogen nuclei (protons), one at a time, was raised through Nitrogen-13, N-14, Oxygen-15, and N-15 which then added a final proton and split into C-12 and Helium-4. The carbon thus acted as a catalyst for the fusion of hydrogen to form helium.

Teller, a restless man, fertile with suggestions, but incapable of sustained cooperation with others, went to Columbia University in 1941, to Chicago in 1942, to Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1942, and to Los Alamos in the spring of 1943. He was obsessed with the idea of a fusion bomb and was greatly encouraged by Oppenheimer who obtained special security clearance for him and invited him both to California in 1942 and to Los Alamos in 1943. In both places he worked on the H-bomb, although it was generally known (as suggested by Fermi) that no H-bomb was possible until there was an A-bomb to ignite it.

Hydrogen nuclei (protons), carrying the same (positive) electrical charges, repel each other so strongly that they cannot be pushed together to fuse into helium unless they are raised to tremendous collision speeds by being heated to hundreds of millions of degrees of temperature. Only an A-bomb could produce such heat. In 1942 Fermi suggested that such fusion could be achieved at a somewhat lower temperature by using heavy hydrogen (deuterium). This is an isotope of hydrogen which is twice as heavy as ordinary hydrogen, since its nucleus consists of two unit particles instead of one. Its discovery, for which Harold Urey won the Nobel Prize in 1934, showed that it existed in nature, chiefly in the form of heavy water (D20 compared to ordinary water H20), in the proportion of about one part of deuterium for every 5,000 of ordinary hydrogen.

Shortly afterward, it was calculated that it might be possible to make an even heavier isotope of hydrogen of triple weight (tritium) with a nucleus of three particles. These could be fused to make helium at an even lower temperature. However, it would be so expensive to make tritium that each bomb would cost billions of dollars. By the end of 1942, it seemed clear that the most feasible way to make a bomb would be to use both deuterium and tritium. Collisions of these at over 100 million degrees of temperature should give helium atoms and enormous energy. At that point the project was put on the shelf, and work concentrated on making the A-bomb, which had to be obtained first.

After the war ended, the outstanding scientists gradually returned to their peacetime teaching and research, so that the AEC laboratories, including Los Alamos, quieted down. The superpatriots subsequently criticized the scientists for this, arguing that the latter should have stayed on the job with AEC to develop better weapons than the Russians. This is nonsense, and is most nonsensical when it is implied that the scientists’ reluctance for weapon development was based on Soviet sympathies. The fact is that America’s whole future depended on getting scientists back to the universities to train new scientists, a job which had been neglected for five years. Moreover, there was another and potent influence working against weapons development in the nuclear area. This was the air force.

The air force could keep its monopoly of atomic weapons only as long as these remained in the large, ungainly shape they had first had in 1945. Accordingly, the air force, through General Brereton’s participation on an AEC committee at the end of 1947, was able to block AEC development of smaller, tactical atom bombs. Only three years later, when these were being developed in spite of its opposition, did the air force try to recapture its privileged nuclear monopoly by beginning to insist on development of the H-bomb. This shift brought it into alliance with Teller who had been vainly advocating the H-bomb all the time since 1942.

Ironically enough, once this alliance had been made, sympathizers and allies of both the air force and of Teller conveniently forgot the former’s earlier opposition to nuclear weapons development and began to question the loyalty of others who had opposed development of the H-bomb, including those “official scientists” who had done so because they realized it would jeopardize the development of tactical A-bombs. Because he cooperated in this attack on Oppenheimer, Teller’s prestige among scientists (but not among congressmen and journalists) was almost irreparably damaged.

The turn toward the H-bomb began in 1949, even before “Joe I,” largely because of the agitations of Teller and his supporters in the California Radiation Laboratory led by E. O. Lawrence and Luis Alvarez. At the same time, Soviet pressure, especially in Berlin, made it increasingly clear that our nuclear weapons system must be reviewed. Teller at once insisted, “H-bomb!” but the official scientists, led by Oppenheimer, suggested development of a wide panoply of nuclear weapons in all sizes and utilities. In general, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) group were reluctant to work for either change. Until 1950, however, the development of smaller A-bombs was prevented by the air-force veto of 1947. As a result, the only testing of A-bombs in the five-year period from Bikini in 1946 to April 1951 was a test at Eniwetok in the spring of 1948 which sought to secure larger bombs by more effective use of nuclear material. At these 1948 tests four bombs were exploded, reaching a size of over 100 kilotons, or almost six times the blast of the 1945 bombs on Japan. This lack of testing from 1948 to 1951, for which the air force was responsible, was later attributed by air-force supporters to Oppenheimer’s Communist sympathies!

“Joe I” brought this stalemate to a crisis. The question of proceeding toward an H-bomb was submitted to the Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC in October, and this group, including Oppenheimer, Conant, Fermi, Lee DuBridge (president of California Institute of Technology), I. I. Rabi of Columbia (Nobel Prize, 1944), and three businessmen, voted unanimously against a crash program to make an H-bomb. Glenn Seaborg (Nobel Prize, 1951), who was absent, was noncommittal. The most vigorous opposition came from Conant. In general, the opposition felt that concentration on an all-out effort to make an H-bomb, whose feasibility was very dubious, would be a poor response to “Joe I” and that a better response would lie in: (1) complete reform of American ground forces, including universal military training; (2) reorganization of the defenses of Western Europe, including Germany; and (3) a drive to make a large and varied assortment of A-bombs, especially by decreasing their size for tactical use.

Teller was chagrined at this decision, a view which was shared by Senator Brien McMahon of the joint congressional committee and by the air force. Teller had been visiting about the country, in his impetuous way, even before this decision, seeking to build up support for “Super” and to recruit scientists, with special attention to Bethe (who opposed the effort to make an H-bomb and finally joined the effort, the following year, because he hoped to prove it was impossible).

The GAC’s unanimous vote against a crash program for the H-bomb in October 1949 was based on a number of considerations, which still seem valid: (1) The scientists feared that the use of the Hanford reactors to make tritium from lithium, instead of continuing to make plutonium from uranium, would jeopardize the development of tactical A-bombs, especially as the manufacture of a pound of tritium would cost the loss of 80 pounds of plutonium; (2) they felt that the threat of our nuclear retaliation was not a sufficient guarantee against nibbling by Soviet ground forces and wanted our ground forces and those of our European supporters reorganized, expanded, and equipped with tactical atomic weapons; (3) they felt that the atom bomb was sufficiently large for any possible target in Soviet industrial plants or Russian cities and that for such targets the hydrogen bomb was not really necessary; (4) they felt that the advantages of adding the H-bomb to the world’s arsenals, in terms of cost, was so slight that the Russians would not try to make it if we abstained from doing so; (5) they felt that the scientific manpower needed to develop the H-bomb could be obtained only from the A-bomb plants or from teaching, and was, for the immediate future, more valuable in these two places; (6) they doubted if any H-bomb would be made small enough to be carried in a plane, and, accordingly, thought it unwise to sacrifice possible strengthening of our defense response where it was urgently needed (on land) for a possibly unobtainable increment of power to our defense response in an area (strategic bombing) where it was not urgently needed, especially as it was not yet established that we would make any nuclear response at all to a minor or moderate Soviet aggression.