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

These considerations, which so deeply disturbed Conant, Oppenheimer, Lilienthal, and others, were ignored by Teller and his allies, who continued to agitate for a crash program for “Super.” The strong support which Teller found in the air force, from the joint congressional committee under Senator McMahon, and from William Liscum Borden, executive director of the joint committee, eventually led President Truman to reverse the GAC. On January 31, 1950, the President gave a decision which has frequently been misrepresented: he ordered the AEC to proceed with its efforts to make the H-bomb and at the same time to continue its work for more varied A-weapons, within the framework of a new over-all survey of American strategic plans which was simultaneously ordered from the National Security Council. This triple order, which is usually misrepresented as the single order for a crash H-bomb effort, required new nuclear reactors.

The order to make an H-bomb was easier to issue than to carry out, because no one knew how to make it. It must be clearly understood that the H-bomb, as tested in November 1952 and subsequently developed, was not based on the lines being followed by Teller in 1946-1951. The true sequence of events has been concealed under enormous waves of false propaganda which have tried to show that Teller’s development of the H-bomb was held up because the Truman Administration was deeply infiltrated with Communists and fellow travelers. This propaganda came from neo-isolationist, Republican, and air-force sources which formed a tacit alliance to discredit the Democratic administrations of 1933-1953- “Twenty Years of Treason,” as they called it.

The chronology here is of some importance. Klaus Fuchs confessed to atomic espionage in England on January 27th; President Truman ordered work on the H-bomb four days later; and McCarthy made his first accusations at Wheeling nine days after that.

One of the reasons the GAC had opposed working on the H-bomb was that such work would jeopardize the production of plutonium and would not overcome the unbalance in our defenses between strategic and tactical forces. On February 24th the Joint Chiefs of Staff demanded that Truman’s order to the AEC “to continue” work on the H-bomb be changed into a “crash program.” About the same time, the White House ordered the reevaluation of our strategic position by the National Security Council; this led eventually to NSC 68. And, finally, the AEC initiated steps to obtain new nuclear reactors. Work on these, begun in 1951, included a tritium production plant on the Savannah River and two U-235 gaseous-diffusion plants at Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky. This gave five great nuclear centers, of which the three diffusion plants used 5.8 million kilowatts of electricity, about half the total output of the TVA, and sufficient for the ordinary needs of 32 million persons. In 1960 this electricity cost over a quarter of a billion dollars, and the total cost of nuclear explosives was running at $2 billion a year.

The method pursued to achieve a thermonuclear explosion up to June 1951, by fusing tritium and deuterium into helium, was possible as a scientific experiment, and was achieved at the beautiful atoll of Eniwetok in April 1951. But this method could not be used for a bomb, since the whole mechanism had to be enclosed in a complex refrigerator the size of a small house. The problem of the bomb was to get the hydrogen isotope particles close enough together so that they would fuse. This could be done at the almost unobtainable temperatures over 400 million degrees. It could be done at lower temperatures if the particles were already close together, as they would be when very cold. As hydrogen gets colder, it liquefies at -423° below zero Fahrenheit, but it is very difficult to keep it that cold. It can be kept at the temperature of liquid air, -4140 F., by immersing it in this, but at that temperature, 90 higher than its own vaporizing point, hydrogen will stay liquid only if it is under pressure of about 2,700 pounds per square inch.

The successful hydrogen fusion at Eniwetok in April, 1951, was achieved with a very small quantity of tritium and deuterium held at these fantastic conditions, then suddenly exposed to the 100-million-degree blast of an exploding A-bomb. The additional energy released by the fusing hydrogen was so small that it was not noticeable to eyewitnesses, but could be inferred from the electronic recording apparatus. Thus it would be a mistake to call this explosion, known as Operation Greenhouse, an H-bomb. As the AEC would say, it was “a thermonuclear device.”

The successful way to the thermonuclear bomb emerged from a suggestion made to Teller in February 1951 by a brilliant young Polish mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam. Teller presented the idea, as developed by himself and his assistant Frederic de Hoffman, to a meeting of the GAC held at the Institute for Advanced Study on June 19-20, 1951. Everyone present realized that the problem was solved. As Oppenheimer said, “It was sweet.” Briefly, the idea was to merge the two separate operations of making tritium out of lithium and fusing the tritium with deuterium into a single operation as a bomb. The feasibility of this new plan was tested in a successful thermonuclear explosion (called “Mike”) as part of the tests of Operation Ivy at Eniwetok on November 1, 1952. This produced a blast equal to about 10 million tons of TNT, creating a fireball 3 1/2 miles wide, whose heat was felt 30 miles away, and which completely destroyed the small islet on which it occurred, leaving a hole in the lagoon 175 feet deep and a mile wide. But this was not a bomb, since the mechanism weighed 65 tons and filled a cubical box 25 feet on each edge.

The great significance of the thermonuclear bomb was that, unlike the A-bomb, it could be made of limitless power. An A-bomb explosion was measured in thousands of tons of TNT (kilotons) and could be made up to a few hundred kilotons in power. The thermonuclear bomb had to be measured in millions of tons of TNT (megatons) and had no limit on its size.

The world’s third thermonuclear explosion was a shocker, exploded by the Russians on August 12, 1953, and revealed to the world by American atmosphere-testing devices. It may have been dropped from a plane; if so, the Russians were far in advance of us, since we did not achieve a droppable bomb until May 21, 1956. In that interval we exploded, at Bikini on March 1, 1954, our first real thermonuclear bomb. It was a horrifying device, a triple-stage fission-fusion-fission bomb which spread death-dealing radioactive contamination over more than 8,000 square miles of the Pacific and injurious radiation over much of the world.

This first American thermonuclear bomb had a trigger of two A-bombs exploded simultaneously to detonate a second stage consisting of Lithium-6 deuteride. This latter was a compound of a lithium isotope of mass 6 (which makes up about one-fifteenth of natural lithium and has a nucleus of three protons with three neutrons) and of heavy Hydrogen-2. This compound, a white crystalline substance, was surrounded with a shiny sphere of almost a ton of metallic natural uranium. The neutrons from the A-bomb trigger, blasting through the lithium deuterium crystals, split the Lithium-6 into helium and tritium (Hydrogen-3); in a tremendous explosion, the latter then fused with the deuterium to make helium, at the same time emitting a great shower of extra neutrons which split the surrounding natural uranium in a superatomic fission holocaust. The whole process occurred almost instantaneously, with a shattering blast equal to 18,000,000 tons of TNT. With the blast was released a vast quantity of deadly radioactive isotopes, including the dangerous

Strontium-90, which, like calcium, is readily absorbed into human bones, where its deadly radiations may easily engender cancer.