Presidential Predicaments: Truman VIII (of VIII) -And Now What?
Before President Truman decided we should make an “all-out” effort to develop a Super Bomb, the General Advisory Committee of our Atomic Energy Commission had invited him to make an approach to the Soviets to try to get them to agree that neither one of us would develop the weapon. President Truman hadn’t chosen to do this.
In June 1950, a few months after President Truman decided we should go ahead and make the all-out effort to develop the Super, the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr had sent an Open Letter to the United Nations. In it, he proposed that the appalling danger to humanity posed by the prospect of a hydrogen bomb might serve as a spur to the United States and the Soviet Union to explore ways of developing better, more open, less war-like relations. Neither side, it turned out, would pursue this either.
On June 25, 1950, a few days after Bohr sent his Open Letter to the United Nations, Communist North Korea had invaded non-Communist South Korea. Now there was that.
At first, the Korean War had gone badly for the anti-Communist side, then gone well, then badly again. While this was going on during 1951, we had figured out something nifty. We’d realized we could use fusion in our regular fission bombs to “boost” their yield. We did this by injecting a small amount of hydrogen gas into the hollow centers of the balls of fissile fuel in our implosion bombs just before the conventional explosives around the ball imploded and crushed the fissile fuel inward. When the imploding fission fuel went supercritical and started to explode, the heat and pressure needed to cause fusion in the hydrogen gas would be created. The fusion would “boost” the fission reaction. This boosting, we found, could double the yield of our fission bombs.
But this wasn’t yet the Super. The conditions of the extreme heat and pressure needed to cause fusion would exist only for milliseconds in fusion fuel in a boosted bomb. The expansion of the fissile fuel as it exploded would quickly stop the chain reaction of fission. The conditions for fusion would cease to exist.
And then, in February 1951, a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos who was a refugee from Poland, Stanislav Ulam, achieved a breakthrough. He saw how the technical problem of the hydrogen bomb could be solved. Afterwards, Ulam got together with the physicist Edward Teller who for years had been pushing the H-bomb but unable to come up with a successful design. In March 1951, the two put together a paper proposing the new idea.
In June 1951, the GAC met in Oppenheimer’s office at Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton to consider Ulam’s idea. After two days of discussion, the group agreed. The new design should work. Earlier, the GAC and the AEC had recommended against an effort to build the Super bomb. They now got behind the project.
Oppenheimer later talked about how he changed his mind about the Super:
The program we had in 1949 was a tortured thing that you could well argue did not make a great deal of technical sense. It was therefore possible to argue that you did not want it even if you could have it. The program in 1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that. The issues became purely the military, the political, and the humane problems of what you were going to do about it once you had it.
After eight years of getting nowhere, the project of creating a Super Bomb would move from concept to test in 19 months. Leaving only the military, the political, and the humane problems.
As with the first atomic bombs, the design work would be done at what was now the Los Alamos National Laboratory. When the current director of the lab, Norris Bradbury, preferred Marshall Holloway to head the project over Edward Teller, Teller walked out and began a political campaign for a second laboratory. With the help of Ernest Lawrence, the physicist at the University of California at Berkeley who had invented the cyclotron and had friends in Washington, Teller was able in 1952 to get the money for a new weapons design laboratory in Livermore, south of Berkeley, that would became known as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Now we would have two weapons design laboratories. Don’t you know they’d be trying to outdo each each other? Their rivalry might turn out to be more serious than the one with the Soviets. We in America thought that “competition” was a good thing, in some situations. In this situation, would the competition help or would it produce excess, duplication and waste? We might find out.
The first hydrogen device, designed at Los Alamos, was detonated at our Pacific Proving Ground on November 1, 1952, in Operation Ivy. The test was called “Mike.” It took place only a couple of days before Eisenhower was elected president.
The device had yielded the equivalent of 10.5 million tons of TNT, seven hundred times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. Edward Teller, 4700 miles away in a basement in Berkeley, saw that the test had been successful on an earthquake detector.
The Korean War stalemate was still on. Could the hydrogen bomb help out there? Hard to see how. As the GAC had said earlier, the hydrogen bomb was even more clearly not a military weapon than the two atomic bombs had been. Hard to see how it could help in a war. Unless it was a “war” of extermination.
It wouldn’t be the first such “war” ever to take hold. But it would be bigger than any predecessors. And end much quicker. There might be some survivors. But, it has been said, by President Ronald Reagan among others, no winners.
Three days after the Mike test, Ike was elected President. At the time of the election, he hadn’t known anything about the Mike test. He wasn’t shown pictures of it until later in his first year in office. Someone in the room with him said that when he saw the pictures, he “blanched.”
After the election, President Truman had this little surprise, then, for Ike. The hydrogen bomb. Maybe Ike could find a use for it.
Next: Presidential Predicaments: Eisenhower I (of VII) - His Way of Dealing with It
Next: Presidential Predicaments: Eisenhower II (of VII)—