Thermonuclear reactions Teller

The other luminaries enlisted for the summer study were Van Vleck, the Swiss-bom Stanford theoretician Felix Bloch, Oppenheimer s former student and close collaborator Robert Serber, a young Indiana theoretician named Emil Konopinski and two postdoctoral assistants. Konopinski and Teller had arrived at the Met Lab at about the same time earlier that year. We were newcomers in the bustling laboratory, Teller writes in a memoir, and for a few days we were given no specific jobs. Teller proposed that he and Konopinski review his calculations that seemed to prove the impossibility of using an atomic bomb to ignite a thermonuclear reaction in deuterium ... 

Teller had examined two thermonuclear reactions that fuse deuterium nuclei to heavier forms and simultaneously release binding energy. Both required that the deuterium nuclei be hot enough when they collided—energetic enough, violently enough in motion—to overcome the nuclear electrical barrier that usually repels them. The minimum necessary energy... 

---