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jump-started the crash program. The Super design was crumbling in front of Teller’s eyes.
    Ulam and Fermi then put another nail in the coffin. Even with an enormous amount of tritium, they found, a pipe full of the stuff simply wouldn’t fuse. If you managed to ignite one end, the reaction would not travel down the pipe. “You can’t get cylindrical containers of deuterium to burn because the energy escapes faster than it reproduces itself,” explained the Los Alamos physicist Richard Garwin a number of years later. He added that “The classical Super could not work. . . . All the time [on the classical Super] was wasted. There had been miscalculation because Teller was optimistic.” After all the commotion and heartache, after the scientific community chose sides in a growing schism, the Super was a fizzle.
    The calculations suggested that the enemies of fusion were right all along. “[Teller] was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the Laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous program on the basis of calculations which he himself must have known to be very incomplete,” wrote Hans Bethe years afterward.
    Teller persisted. He had already dreamed up alternate designs for a fusion bomb. One was made out of alternating layers of fissionable heavy atoms and fusionable light atoms. Dubbed the “Alarm Clock” design (because it would wake the world to the prospect of fusion weapons), it had a serious drawback. To make it more and more powerful, designers had to add layer after layer to the bomb. By the time it reached the megaton range, it was too big to deliver. It was not a practical superweapon. It did not promise the unlimited power that Teller was seeking. Neither did his other suggestion. Teller realized that by adding a tiny bit of tritium to the center of an exploding fission warhead, the tritium would fuse and “boost” the yield of the atom bomb. This was a practical idea—and it ultimately did work—but it was just a way of making a slightly better fission weapon. It was far from the thermonuclear fusion superbomb that Teller had promised.
    Teller kept up a brave face in public. He tried to recruit scientists to come to Los Alamos to work on fusion weapons. “The holiday is over,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists . “Hydrogen bombs will not produce themselves.” However, Teller was fresh out of ideas. Neither the Alarm Clock nor boosted bombs provided the unlimited-power weapons Teller—or Truman—wanted. The crash program was stalling even before it started.
    World politics made the situation dire. On June 25, North Korean soldiers marched across the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea. Seoul fell within days. And within two weeks, General Douglas MacArthur was figuring out how best to use nuclear bombs in the conflict. The battle went back and forth. Then, in November, soon after China entered the war, Truman threatened the use of atomic weapons. MacArthur asked for the discretion to use them on the battlefield. The world seemed on the brink of nuclear war. 10 The fusion bomb, the weapon that was supposed to restore America’s military advantage, was nowhere to be found.
    By the autumn of 1950, Teller was desperate. “He proposed a number of complicated schemes to save [the Super], none of which seemed to show much promise,” wrote Bethe. “It was evident that he did not know of any solution.” The head of Los Alamos, Norris Bradbury, a man whom Teller viewed as an ally of Oppenheimer’s, halted design work on the Super until some important tests, scheduled for early 1951, could be run. Teller was furious at the delay. He was at the brink of despair when Bradbury wrote a report summarizing the project for the GAC, Oppenheimer’s advisory committee. In Teller’s eyes “his report was focused on the Super and was so negative that it seemed an outright attempt to squash the project.” Teller and John Archibald Wheeler, a theoretical physicist and