THE STORY OF THE HYDROGEN-BOMB

Wednesday is my sci-tech day.  With the recent passage of Richard Garwin, I'll assess where we are today on the Hydrogen Bomb, for he was the individual who was in charge of building the first one in 1951, at the age of 23.  Yes, he lived to be 97.

My only link to nuclear energy is that I twice worked under Edward Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  But this was in the 1970's, and for half a century I haven't done much in this field.  In any case, at LLNL I was with the laser fusion program.  Teller was not only the father of the Hydrogen Bomb, he also was director of this lab, where John Nuckols had developed a process to use a laser to produce fusion for power.

Teller came to Hawaii in the 70's, proposing a bank of wind turbines at the top of the Koolaus.  This was so long ago that Google can't find that photo, which was on the front page of one of the local newspapers.  While there, I joined him and Momoko Ito for a most memorable breakfast at the Waikiki Hyatt Regency.  Wish I had videotaped that session.  Momoko went on later to become president of Sharp Electronics in Japan.

But about the Hydrogen Bomb.

• In 1951, Richard Garwin was asked by Edward Teller to design the first H-bomb, which was codenamed Mike, and tested at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.  Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi indicated that Garwin was the only true genius he ever met.  Photo of Fermi and Garwin (right) in the 60s.
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  But there is a lot more history before that first ignition.
• In a 1946 meeting attended by Teller, John Von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam and Klaus Emil Fuchs (right), it was determined that a Hydrogen Bomb was feasible.  Fuchs, it turned out, was the traitor who informed the Soviet Union of this info, and continued to feed them developmental data.  
• Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy, who supplied information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and after World War II.
• Not only was he part of the A-Bomb team, he was involved in the early models of the H-Bomb.
• In 1946 Fuchs and John von Neumann filed a patent describing an H-Bomb.
• He was arrested in 1950, spent 9 years in prison, and returned to East Germany.

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  Was he a dastardly traitor....or conscientious pacifist?   He became a Quaker in 1933.  His children supported communism, and Fuchs himself formed Soviet links before the Manhattan Project.  Essentially, he hated Hitler's Germany and was pro-Russia.
• When asked why he had spied, Fuchs answered: "Knowledge of atomic research should not be the private property of any one country but should be shared with the rest of the world for the benefit of mankind."^[65]
• He never accepted any payment for spying.

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  To the astonishment of U.S. authorities, the Soviet Union on 23September1949 exploded JOE-1, their first Atomic Bomb.  Both President Harry Truman and Major General Leslie Groves (who ran the Manhattan Project) that it would take the Russians several decades to do this.

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  On 1November1952, Operation of IVY of the the U.S. exploded Mike Shot, at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the first H-Bomb.  The term used was thermonuclear.  The equivalent was 10 megatons of TNT, roughly 1000 times larger than the Hiroshima A-Bomb.  But this was not a practical weapon because the fuel was liquid deuterium and had to be kept cooled to -250C.

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  The H-Bomb was tested on 16November1952 known as King Shot.  Dropped from an aircraft, the fission produced 500 kilotons, 25 that of the Hiroshima A-Bomb.
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  Operation CASTLE came in the spring of 1954.  The Bravo test on 1March1954 used lithium deuteride as the fuel, and yielded 15 megatons.  This bomb was deliverable.  However, this was stronger than anticipated, and produced radioactive fallout over a Japanese fishing trawler, and nuclear testing became public.  It was also the largest nuclear device ever to be tested by the U.S., for President Eisenhower vetoed further work.

• In 1955, the Soviet Union exploded its first H-Bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site.  Had a yield of 1.6 megatons.  
• Then on 23October1961 came the largest H-Bomb ever, the Tsar Bomba, with a yield of 57 (some say 58) megatons at Novaya Zemiya (red dot).  Andrei Sakharov indicated they could have made it bigger, but windows in Moscow might have been blown in.  This secret video was released by the Soviet Union on 1961.

So how big can a bomb be made?  The Tsar Bomba was ten times more powerful than all of the combined munitions used during World War II.  It is said to be theoretically possible to build a nuclear bomb more than 100 times more powerful than the Tsar Bomba.

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