The Work of Many Men

Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, last week published his eagerly awaited account of the explorations that made the weapon possible. Printed in Science, weekly publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and entitled "The Work of Many People," it is a modest and moving effort to close the rift opened by the political and ethical debate over whether to go ahead with the "super."

"At the present time," says Teller, "I find myself unhappily in a situation of being given certainly too much credit and perhaps too much blame for what has happened. Yet, I feel that the development of the hydrogen bomb should not divide those who in the past have argued about it, but rather should unite all of us who, in a close or distant way, by work or by criticism, have contributed toward its completion. Disunity of the scientists is one of the greatest dangers for our country."

Intent on those two aims--service to his adopted country and the cooperation of scientists in the pursuit of truth--Hungarian-born Scientist Teller carefully refrains from raking over the old controversy about whether an H-bomb should be attempted. He says he does not know enough to write of the political controversy over the H-bomb, "but I feel that great gratitude is due to the men who in those difficult weeks [after the Soviet atomic explosion about Sept. 1, 1949] arrived at the correct conclusions," i.e., to proceed with all possible speed toward the development of an H-bomb. Teller's account minimizes his own part in that development far beneath the credit given him by other scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer. Says Teller: "I want to claim credit in one respect only. I believed and continued to believe in the possibility and the necessity of developing the thermonuclear bomb." Wholly aside from his theoretical contributions, this is Teller's lien upon the gratitude of his countrymen, that he was not diverted from the path of scientific advance by confusion over nonscientific considerations.

From Bukharin to "Mike." His story of the bomb's long development contains the names of 58 men. Teller comes as close as security will let him to telling what each contributed. Highlights:

P: His story starts in 1934 when George Gamow, a Russian physicist who had escaped from the U.S.S.R., arrived in the U.S. Gamow had a tale to tell that flashed back to 1932. He had talked at a Russian scientific meeting about a paper by an English astronomer and a German physicist who suggested that the energy radiated by the sun and other stars was caused by reactions between atomic nuclei. A nonscientist, Nikolai Bukharin, a top Communist official in the post-Lenin era, approached Gamow. He asked Gamow if nuclear reactions like those of the sun could be created on earth and put to some use. Bukharin even offered to turn over the Leningrad electrical works to Gamow for a few hours every night for experimentation. Gamow replied that no practical application was possible. But the incident stuck in his mind, and he was later to stir the interest of U.S. scientists in thermonuclear reactions like those inside the stars. (If the Communists ever decide to canonize Bukharin, whom they executed in 1938, they may claim him as the grandfather of the H-bomb.)

P: Gamow's interest in stellar reactions led Hans Bethe to calculate systematically all thermonuclear reactions. Says Teller: "Gamow had invented a new kind of game for the physicists, and Bethe proved to be the champion at it."

P: No scientist expected to be able to arrange thermonuclear reactions similar to those they studied in the stars; the required heat seemed unattainable. In 1938 Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission, and their discovery led directly to the Abomb. And fission, with its intense release of energy, also suggested that conditions could be created under which thermonuclear reactions might occur. The late Enrico Fermi in 1942 suggested to Teller that fission could be used to start thermonuclear reaction in deuterium (heavy hydrogen). "After a few weeks of hard thought," Teller recalls, "I decided that deuterium could not be ignited by atomic bombs."

P: The same year, Teller went over his reasoning on this point with Emil Konopinski. They found loopholes. Later, after discussions with Oppenheimer and others, Konopinski suggested that tritium be considered instead of deuterium. "At that time it was a mere guess. It turned out to be an inspired one." These discussions were held at Berkeley, where Oppenheimer had gathered a group of distinguished theoretical physicists. Teller remembers the period wistfully. "The spirit of spontaneity, adventure and surprise of those weeks in Berkeley was never recaptured for me in the many years of hard work in which atomic bombs were developed . . . I am sure that all the participants in those discussions still remember vividly the days when we thought that the atomic bomb could be easily used for a steppingstone toward a thermonuclear explosion which we called a 'super' bomb."

P: In 1943, Los Alamos was established under the direction of Oppenheimer, to whom Teller gives unstinted credit for pushing A-bomb development "in time to have an influence upon the war." But Oppenheimer, Fermi and others did not lose sight of thermonuclear possibilities.

P: At this point, Konopinski settled for the theorists a question that still bothers laymen who worry about chain reactions destroying the planet. "He proved that a thermonuclear reaction, even if initiated on the earth, could not spread under any circumstances. It was necessary to prove, and he did prove, that the 'super' bomb could not ignite the atmosphere or the ocean."

P: After Hiroshima, Los Alamos' spirit was kept alive by its new director, Norris Bradbury.

P: After the Soviet atomic explosion and the subsequent Washington decision to press for an H-bomb, calculations based on the theories of Teller and others were set up on a machine called ENIAC. But there was fear that this electric brain would be too slow. Stan Ulam, a mathematician, with one helper, "undertook to execute the same job by straightforward hand computation. The next few months saw an amazing competition between the tortoise and the (electronic) hare." Ulam's "results were available even before the lengthy instructions to the machines had been completed . . . In a real emergency the mathematician still wins--if he is really good."

P: Ulam's results contradicted the theories of the physicists. They had taken hope when the machines' early returns seemed to confirm the physicists. But when ENIAC's answers were complete, Ulam was vindicated, and the physicists had to start theorizing all over again.

P: By early 1951 a crude thermonuclear experiment had been set up at Eniwetok in the Pacific--Operation Greenhouse. Says Teller: "What remains most clear in my mind is the contrast between the spectacular explosion, which in itself meant nothing, and the small piece of paper handed to me by my good friend Louis Rosen, which showed that the experiment was a success."

P: But Greenhouse was not a bomb. On the hard road to the goal of the transportable bomb, Teller singles out two steps: an imaginative suggestion by Ulam and a fine calculation by Frederic de Hoffmann. Of De Hoffmann, Teller says:

"Since I had made the suggestion that led to [De Hoffmann's] calculation, I expected that we would jointly sign the report containing the results. Freddie, however, had other plans. He signed the report with my name only and argued that the suggestion counted for everything and the execution for nothing. I still feel ashamed that I consented."

By the time the first H-bomb was to be exploded, Teller had left Los Alamos to organize a nuclear weapons laboratory at Livermore, Calif. ("Science . . . thrives on friendly competition"). He watched for the results of the first H-bomb, "Mike," on a University of California seismograph. Teller writes: "The room was completely dark except for the tiny luminous spot that the pencil of light threw on the photographic paper . . . Soon the luminous point gave me the feeling of being aboard a gently and irregularly moving vessel, so I braced a pencil on a piece of the apparatus and held it close to the luminous point . . . About a quarter of an hour was required for the shock to travel, deep under the Pacific basin, to the California coast. I waited with little patience . . . At last . . . the luminous point appeared to dance wildly and irregularly. Was it only that the pencil which I held as a marker trembled in my hand? . . . Then the trace appeared on the photographic plate . . . clear and big and unmistakable . . . Mike was a success."

Duty & Faith. Nowhere in the article does Teller withdraw or modify his testimony about Oppenheimer before the AEC's security board when he said: "I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands" (than Oppenheimer's).

For those who still question the wisdom of going ahead with the H-bomb, Teller has words of firm faith: "We would be unfaithful to the tradition of Western civilization if we were to shy away from exploring the limits of human achievement. It is our specific duty as scientists to explore and to explain . . . The construction of the thermonuclear weapon was a great challenge to the technical people of this country. To be in possession of this instrument is an even greater challenge to the free community in which we live. I am confident that, whatever the scientists are able to discover or invent, the people will be good enough and wise enough to control it for the ultimate benefit of everyone."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.