Super-bombs

The second report, Memorandum on the properties of a radioactive super-bomb, a less technical document, was apparently intended as an alternative presentation for nonscientists. This study explored beyond the technical questions of design and production to the strategic issues of possession and use it managed at the same time both seemly innocence and extraordinary prescience ... 

As a weapon, the super-bomb would be practically irresistible. There is no material or structure that could be expected to resist the force of the explosion ... 

This last real super bomb is probably at least as distant now as was the fission bomb when you and I first heard of the enterprise. 

They were convinced, they wrote, that weapons quantitatively and qualitatively far more effective than now available will result from further work on these problems. (Among such weapons they thought the technical prospects of the realization of the super bomb to be quite favorable. ) They could not, however, devise or propose effective military countermeasures for atomic weapons and it was their firm opinion that no military countermeasures will be found. They were not only unable to outline a program that would assure this nation for the next decades hegemony in the field of atomic weapons, but were equally unable to insure that such hegemony, if achieved, could protect us from the most terrible destruction. What followed, they thought, was the necessity of political change ... 

When, he asked in the question-and-answer format he adopted, could the first super bomb be tried out He answered with two numbers, the second an early example of what has come to be called threat inflation ... 

Teller thought that civil defense measures such as the dispersal of cities might prove effective against atomic bombs but very much less so against super bombs. He could not yet offer detailed plans for the peaceful use of thermonuclear explosives. But I consider it a certainty that the... 

The undertaking of the new and important Super Bomb project would necessarily involve a considerable fraction of the resources which are likely to be devoted to work on atomic developments in the next years We feel it ap-... 

Memorandum. .. super-bomb Ronald M. Clark found this document among the papers of Henry Ti-zard and published it in Clark (1965), p. 214ff. 

To those readers who ve built Oan Moore s "Super Bazooka"on page 53 and have spent the past few months free time by blasting away at trees and fenceposts In sessions of secret target practice, the question has probably arisen as to what to do with all those empty rocket engines Fervent Survival-ists needn t discard them as useless because 1 have Just the Information you need to turn those little tubes into some of the best smoke n stink bombs available. 

On December 7, 1946, New York internist Sam Seidlin and his colleagues made the exciting announcement that radioiodine could not just ameliorate but could cure metastatic cancer of the thyroid. Marshall Brucer at Oak Ridge has written that, within days every Congressman heard the news from his constituents. On Janaury 1,1947, the U S Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) took over the distribution of radioisotopes from the super secret Manhattan District Project of World War II that had developed the atomic bomb. Brucer believed that Seidlin s article was the most important ever published in the history of nuclear medicine. 

The theoreticians let Teller s bomb distract them. It was new, important and spectacular and they were men with a compulsion to know. The theory of the fission bomb was well taken care of by Berber and two of his young people, Bethe explains. They seemed to have it well under control so we felt we didn t need to do much. The essentials of fast-neutron fission were firm—it needed experiment more than theory. The senior men turned their collective brilliance to fusion. They had not yet bothered to name generic bombs of uranium and plutonium. But from the pre-anthropic darkness where ideas abide in nonexistence until minds imagine them into the light, the new bomb emerged already chased with the technocratic euphemism of art deco slang the Super, they named it. 

Rose Bethe, who was then twenty-four, understood instantly. My wife knew vaguely what we were talking about, says Bethe, and on a walk in the mountains in Yosemite National Park she asked me to consider carefully whether I really wanted to continue to work on this. Finally, I decided to do it. The Super was a terrible thing. But the fission bomb had to come first in any case and the Germans were presumably doing it. ... 

I didn t believe it from the first minute, Bethe scoffs. Oppie took it sufficiently seriously that he went to see Compton. I don t think I would have done it if I had been Oppie, but then Oppie was a more enthusiastic character than I was. I would have waited until we knew more. Oppenheimer had other urgent business with Compton in any case the Super itself. Not to risk their loss, the bomb-project leaders were no longer allowed to fly. Oppenheimer tracked Compton by telephone at the beginning of a... 

A formal status report went off immediately from the Executive Committee to Bush. It predicted enough fissionable material for a test in eighteen months—by March 1944. It estimated that a 30-kiIogram bomb of U235 should have a destructive effect equivalent to the explosion of over 100,000 tons of TNT, much more than the mere 2,000 tons estimated earlier. And it dramatically announced the Super ... 

But Teller had received no concomitant administrative appointment that April, and the omission aggrieved him. He was qualified to lead the Theoretical Division Oppenheimer appointed Hans Bethe instead. He was qualified to lead a division devoted to work toward a thermonuclear fusion weapon, a Super, but no such division was established. The laboratory had decided at its opening conference, and the Lewis committee had affirmed in May, that thermonuclear research should be restricted largely to theoretical studies and held to distant second priority behind fission an atomic bomb, since it would trigger any thermonuclear arrangement, necessarily came first there was a war on and manpower was limited. 

A year earlier, in the midst of war, James Bryant Conant had visited Los Alamos and talked to Teller about the Super. Teller had predicted then, as Conant reported to Vannevar Bush, that the Super was probably at least as distant now as was the fission bomb when. .. I first heard of the enterprise. That estimate—between four and five years—was already optimistic compared to Fermi s. Now, in October 1945, Teller set it as an upper limit. He also first stated for the record many of the arguments for pursuing technological security that he would elaborate in the decades to come. 

An attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow warned on December 24 that the U.S.S.R. is out to get the atomic bomb. This has been officially stated. The meager evidence available indicates that great efforts are being made and that super-priority will be given to the enterprise. At home was incomprehension, Herbert York remembers To most. .. of us, Russia was as mysterious and remote as the other side of the moon and not much more productive when it came to really new ideas or inventions. A common joke of the time said that the Russians could not surreptitiously introduce nuclear bombs in suitcases into the United States because they had not yet been able to perfect a suitcase. But if American leaders did not believe the Soviet Union could soon achieve an atomic bomb, what it would do otherwise and what were its motives had become a matter of intense debate within the U.S. government. 

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