Sun in a Bottle Read Online Free PDF

so-called hydrogen or superbomb.”
     
     
    Truman’s hand had been forced, but he had just made a dangerous decision. He had committed the United States to an arms race with the Soviet Union that would make both countries insecure and lead the world to the brink of destruction, all for the sake of a fusion weapon that, at the time, was merely a figment of Teller’s fertile imagination.
    Truman almost certainly didn’t know this, but when he made his announcement, the fusion project at Los Alamos was entering its darkest time. Just weeks before, calculations from Los Alamos were starting to prove that Teller’s fusion bomb was a flop.
    It was hard—damnably hard—to get enough light atoms hot enough and dense enough to create a hydrogen bomb. Teller, as a theorist, made his best guesses as to how to engineer such a device and estimate what was needed to get it to explode. However, theorists sometimes overlook little niggling practicalities that make the job harder than they originally imagine. Teller’s initial plans for the Super were little more than an atom bomb at one end of a tank of deuterium. The energy from the atom bomb would make the deuterium so hot that the atoms would slam together and stick, fusing and releasing energy. But Teller’s deuterium bomb ran into problems from the start. Even deuterium, which is much easier to fuse than ordinary hydrogen, would be hard to ignite. In 1942, mere months after Teller’s initial visions of the Super, scientists realized that a “hydrogen bomb” should have tritium, a still heavier version of hydrogen, mixed in with the deuterium if it was to have any chance of exploding. The problem is that tritium doesn’t occur much in nature; it has to be manufactured if you want a large quantity of it. And this process required the same resources—and was about as expensive—as manufacturing plutonium.
    Even though tritium was scarce, the unlimited power promised by the Super made it worth producing. According to Teller’s estimates, it would require a few hundred grams of tritium—a significant, but manageable, amount of the rare substance—to get the Super working. Those estimates were wildly optimistic.
    In December 1949, the month before Truman’s fateful announcement, the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, along with his colleague, Cornelius Everett, began extremely tedious calculations to figure out whether, in fact, Teller’s Super would work. They worked with pencil and paper, slide rules, and a set of dice. 9 With each roll of the dice, it became more and more evident that Teller’s Super would fail to ignite the tank of deuterium and tritium. Françoise Ulam, Stanislaw’s wife, noted how Teller reacted to the ever-worsening news. “Every day Stan would come into the office, look at our computations, and come back with new ‘guestimates,’ while Teller objected loudly and cajoled every one around into disbelieving the results,” she wrote. “What should have been the common examination of difficult problems became an unpleasant confrontation.” Ulam wrote that the calculations made Teller “pale with anger.” Ulam and Teller already disliked each other, and it was reported that Ulam “took real pleasure” in knocking down Teller’s pet project.
    By February, it was absolutely clear that the Super wouldn’t work. Instead of requiring a few hundred grams of tritium, the Ulam-Everett calculations implied that a Super would need ten times that—a few kilograms. There was no way the United States could manufacture that amount of tritium in a reasonable period of time. Teller’s device was impractical.
    “Teller was not easily reconciled to our results,” wrote Stanislaw Ulam years later. “I learned that the bad news drove him to tears of frustration.” Nevertheless, the calculations were solid. It was less than a month after Truman announced the superbomb project—and a month before Truman signed an executive order that officially