# Notes on Dark Sun (The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb)

In the past couple of years it’s been popular to read Richard Rhodes’ [The Making of the Atomic Bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb), especially after [Situational Awareness](https://situational-awareness.ai/)’s prediction / promotion of a new Manhattan Project in AI. However, I think you’ll find more which applies to the current moment *in Dark Sun*. Consider: physicists in America have created a powerful new dual-use technology[^an4hg46klpr] and we’re now in the process of scaling it *way* up. America is racing its communist geopolitical rival, because they both anticipate that this technology could give the other the upper hand. The secrets of how to build it are key, and there’s some leakage from the leading lab(s), and computing is a major bottleneck.

Lend-lease and espionage.
-------------------------

My first surprise when reading the book was that, sure, espionage was important (you may have heard of [Julius and Ethel Rosenberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg), [Klaus Fuchs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs), or other spies), but the US also simply gave a lot to the Soviet Union, through the [Lend-Lease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease) program, under which the US supplied its allies in the war[^6086bynau95]:

> In the course of the war, under the Lend-Lease Act, the United States delivered some $46 billion worth of equipment, supplies and services to Britain, China and other allies -- the preponderance of it by sea, but the most urgent of it by air. Twenty-five percent of that total, $11 billion, went to the Soviet Union after the German invasion of the USSR, of which $1.5 billion paid for services. Of the remaining $9.5 billion, munitions accounted for about half the value of Soviet shipments, including thousands of B-25 bombers and other aircraft, more than 400,000 trucks ('Just imagine," Nikita Khrushchev would say later, "how we would have advanced from Stalingrad to Berlin without \[American trucks\]"), $814 million worth of ordnance and ammunition, thousands of tanks, a merchant fleet and 581 naval vessels. The other half, nonmunitions, included thirteen million pairs of winter boots, five million tons of food, two thousand locomotives, eleven thousand box-cars, 540,000 tons of rails and $111 million worth of petroleum products.
> 
> *Nonmunitions also, pointedly, included entire factories: "complete alcohol, synthetic rubber, and petroleum cracking plants," in the words of a postwar congressional report, "together with the requisite engineering drawings, operating and maintenance manuals, spare parts lists, and other pertinent documents." *[*Harry Gold*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Gold)*'s collections from Abe Brothman gave the Soviet Union an early start; but by 1943 the United States was supplying directly the plans for synthetic rubber and other factories that Gold had shivered in the cold in 1942 to accumulate by espionage.* [^ejyfm1baew]

Particularly interesting were the experiences of US Army Air Corps officer [George Racey Jordan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Racey_Jordan), who oversaw shipments through Gore Field in Great Falls, Montana, the start of the [Northwest Staging Route](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Staging_Route). On the [Alaska Siberian air road](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALSIB) (ALSIB), cargo departed from Montana, transited through Alaska, and into Siberia. In the winter of 1942-43, Jordan started noticing something unusual about the cargo[^vc9vqsbo55e]:

> Soon what Jordan called "the black suitcases" began to arrive, "the unusual number of black patent-leather suitcases, bound with white window-sash cord and sealed with red wax, which were coming through on the route to Moscow." They raised Jordan's suspicions. The first six, in charge of a Russian officer, Jordan passed as personal luggage. "But the units mounted to ten, twenty and thirty and at last to standard batches of fifty, which weighed almost two tons and consumed the cargo allotment of an entire plane. The officers were replaced by armed couriers, traveling in pairs, and the excuse for avoiding inspection was changed from 'personal luggage to 'diplomatic immunity."

Jordan started inspecting the cargo and recording what he found[^aykutvisql6]:

> He found voluminous copies of secret reports sent back to the State Department from American attachés in Moscow. He found other State Department documents with their edges trimmed, either to conserve space or, he suspected, to cut away classification stamps. *He found a large map which bore a legend he recorded as "Oak Ridge-Manhattan Engineer Dept. of District I think it was," a place he had never heard of before. He wrote down words he did not recognize from other documents he skimmed: "Uranium 92-neutron-proton and deuteron-isotope—energy produced by fission or splitting-look up cyclotron.... Heavy-water hydrogen or deuterons.*"

> In later shipments of black suitcases Jordan claimed *he found blueprints of American factories*, including the General Electric plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, where aircraft turbochargers were manufactured and the Electric Boat Company of Groton, Connecticut, which built submarines. *Entire planeloads of copies of US patents went through Great Falls*. A congressional committee determined after the war that the number of patents the Soviets thus legally acquired "runs into the hundreds of thousands."
> 
> I began to realize an important fact: while we were a pipeline to Russia, Russia was also a pipeline to us.... The entry of Soviet personnel into the United States was completely uncontrolled. *Planes were arriving regularly from Moscow with unidentified Russians aboard*. I would see them jump off planes, hop over fences, and run for taxicabs. They seemed to know in advance exactly where they were headed, and how to get there.
> 
> Jordan acquired copies of the Soviets' own itemized lists of Lend-Lease shipments and confirmed what he had recorded at Gore Field: that the Roosevelt administration shipped quantities of what he called "atomic materials" to the USSR as part of Lend-Lease. From the Soviet lists he extracted the relevant totals, including materials useful in constructing and controlling a nuclear reactor and a small quantity of heavy water (about 1.2 quarts):
> 
> | Beryllium metals | 9,681 lbs. |
> | --- | --- |
> | Cadmium alloys | 72,535 lbs. |
> | Cadmium metals | 834,989 lbs. |
> | Cobalt ore and concentrate | 33,600 lbs. |
> | Cobalt metal and scrap | 806,941 Ibs. |
> | Uranium metal | 1 kg. |
> | Aluminum tubes | 13,766,472 lbs. |
> | Graphite, natural | 7,384,282 lbs |
> | Graphite electrodes | 21,131,124 Ibs. |
> | Deuterium oxide (heavy water) | 1,100 grs. |
> | Thorium salts and compounds | 25,352 lbs. |
> | Uranium nitrate | 500 lbs. |
> | Uranium nitrate (UO~2~) | 220 lbs. |
> | Uranium oxide | 500 lbs. |
> | Uranium oxide (U~3~0~8~) | 200 lbs. |

How useful was all this information to the Soviet atomic program? It seems quite significant both from the perspective of how much information they had access to, as well as how they used it[^c3610n7ljqp]:

> Two shocking quantitative measures of the extent of Soviet wartime atomic espionage emerge in contemporary and retrospective accounts. In a letter to [Lavrenti Beria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria) dated September 29, 1944, [Igor Kurchatov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Kurchatov) refers to "new, very extensive \[espionage\] materials... concerning the uranium problem" he has been reviewing— that is, materials that had been acquired after the large collection he had already reviewed-and notes parenthetically that these materials constitute "(about 3,000 pages of text)." And the Soviet physicist Yakov Petrovich Terletsky reports that when he joined the special department of the NKVD set up after the end of the war to deal with atomic espionage, he found "about 10,000 pages of... reports in the safes… for the most part American classified reports (there were also British materials). They outlined the content of the basic experiments on determining the parameters of nuclear reactions, reactors, and the description of various types of uranium reactors, the description of gaseous-diffusion installations, journal entries on the testing of the atomic bomb and so on."

Here’s one quote attributed to [Roald Sagdeev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Sagdeev):

> [Kurchatov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Kurchatov) used American materials for the dual purpose of double-checking the scientific results obtained by members of his team, and for evaluating the probability that the stolen secrets might contain purposely planted disinformation. Inside the Russian nuclear establishment legends were told of how his subordinates —the theoretical physicists—would report to Kurchatov with freshly calculated formulas. According to their accounts, *Kurchatov would look carefully at their work, then silently open the safe with the precious stolen American secrets to compare the results. "No, it is not right," he would say. "You have to work more and come again."*

Acheson-Lilienthal and the Baruch Plan
--------------------------------------

Soon after the end of WWII in 1945, both the US and the Soviet Union agreed that the UN Atomic Energy Commission should control the use of atomic energy, but they needed a policy that both sides could sign. So, in 1946, the Truman administration formed a committee to write it. They produced the Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy, aka The [Acheson-Lilienthal report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson%E2%80%93Lilienthal_Report) (after the committee chairs [Dean Acheson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Acheson) and [David Lilienthal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Lilienthal)), which concluded that control of fissile material based on inspection / policing wouldn’t work, and that instead, *all fissile material* *should be owned by an international agency*, which would own it from the mines through enrichment, and could release said material to individual countries for peaceful use.

Why this scheme? The report says that “any system based on outlawing the purely military development of atomic energy and relying solely on inspection for enforcement would at the outset be surrounded by conditions which would destroy the system”. (Both because states have a strong incentive to develop atomic energy for both peaceful and military purposes, and because inspection is difficult.)

Truman appointed millionaire financier [Bernard Baruch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Baruch) to present a finished US proposal to the UN. Baruch presented a [plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Plan) based on Acheson-Lilienthal, but which included three new provisions: (1) “swift and sure punishment” for violation of the treaty, (2) that the US would only give up the bomb after effective control (of other nations) was in place, and (3) that the UN Security Council veto be suspended in matters of atomic control.

These three conditions made Baruch’s plan severe enough towards the Soviet side that some historians have questioned how sincere the Baruch plan was. Larry Gerber argues that the plan’s structure virtually guaranteed rejection, and so it served as early Cold War positioning, by fixing blame on Moscow[^phi6wuzfirk]. David Painter frames is as risk mitigation[^7xjb9bg509p]:

> Truman believed that the United States should maintain its monopoly over nuclear weapons until a foolproof system of control was in place. He wrote Baruch in July 1946, “we should not under any circumstances throw away our gun until we are sure the rest of the world can’t arm against us”

Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Union rejected the proposal, fearing that it would perpetuate a US nuclear monopoly, then countered with a proposal for immediate and universal nuclear disarmament (meaning that the US, as the only nuclear power, would have to take the first step). Both plans were discussed until 1948, though of course were never accepted.

The General Advisory Committee
------------------------------

Though nuclear proliferation was now assured, building thermonuclear bombs (AKA the “hydrogen bomb” or “super”) wasn’t.

In 1946, with the [Atomic Energy Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Energy_Act_of_1946), the US [Atomic Energy Commission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Atomic_Energy_Commission) was created. The AEC also formed a board of scientific advisors, the General Advisory Committee (GAC), which included nine of the most prominent scientists and engineers of the time [^zqyoee65r6r].

Three years later, in September 1949, the US detected the USSR’s first atomic test (Designated RDS-1 by the Soviets, but called “[Joe 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDS-1)” by the Americans (a reference to “Uncle Joe” Stalin)). Eight of the men of the GAC[^hgxb1gjejza] held a special meeting in October 1949 to advise on a response (with a specific focus on the super project).[^tj4fqzkdo8]

Their final report recommended building more reactors and isotope-separation plants, producing more fissile material (uranium, plutonium, polonium, etc), and also endorsed building tactical atomic weapons[^y8la7dpsrfg]. It even endorsed producing tritium for boosting fission bombs, however, regarding thermonuclear weapons, they said (unanimously) that “*the super program itself should not be undertaken*.”

They also produced two annexes to the report: a majority annex signed by six of the men[^vmj0ixsfb7c] and a second statement signed by the other two[^azf2j033zlc].

The [majority annex](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1949v01/d211):

> We have been asked by the Commission whether or not they should immediately initiate an “all-out” effort to develop a weapon whose energy release is 100 to 1000 times greater and whose destructive power in terms of area of damage is 20 to 100 times greater than those of the present atomic bomb. *We recommend strongly against such action*.
> 
> *We believe a super bomb should never be produced*. Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon until the present climate of world opinion changes.
> 
> It is by no means certain that the weapon can be developed at all and by no means certain that the Russians will produce one within a decade. To the argument that the Russians may succeed in developing this weapon, we would reply that *our undertaking it will not prove a deterrent to them*. Should they use the weapon against us, *reprisals by our large stock of atomic bombs would be comparably effective to the use of a super*.
> 
> In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb, *we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus of limiting the fear and arousing the hope of mankind*.

And the [Fermi and Rabi annex](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1949v01/d211)[^4adl8b3rn02]:

> Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. *By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide*.
> 
> It is clear that the *use of such a weapon cannot be justified* on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country. It is evident to us that this would be the view of peoples in other countries. Its use would put the United States in a bad moral position relative to the peoples of the world.
> 
> Any postwar situation resulting from such a weapon would leave unresolvable enmities for generations. *A desirable peace cannot come from such an inhuman application of force*. The postwar problems would dwarf the problems which confront us at present....
> 
> The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon *makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light*.

Beyond morality, their recommendations also had a basis in security (Oppenheimer):

> The notion that the thermonuclear arms race was something that was in the interests of this country to avoid if it could was very clear to us in 1949.
> 
> We may have been wrong. We thought it was something to avoid even if we could jump the gun by a couple of years, or even if we could outproduce the enemy, because we were infinitely more vulnerable \[because more of the US population lives in large cities than does the Soviet population\] and infinitely less likely to initiate the use of these weapons, and because the world in which great destruction has been done in all civilized parts of the world is a harder world for America to live with than it is for the Communists to live with....
> 
> We thought \[a US decision not to build the thermonuclear\]... would make it less likely that the Russians would attempt \[it\] and less likely that they would succeed in the undertaking.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the other hand, in their own report:

> The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the United States would be in an intolerable position if a possible enemy possessed the bomb and the United States did not.... It would be foolhardy altruism for the United States voluntarily to weaken its capability by such a renunciation. Public renunciation by the United States of super bomb development might be interpreted as the first step in unilateral renunciation of the use of all atomic weapons, a course which would inevitably be followed by major international realignments to the disadvantage of the United States. Thus, the peace of the world generally and, specifically, the security of the entire Western Hemisphere would be jeopardized.

Eventually the scientists’ arguments didn’t matter[^lrsd7z3ua3a]:

> Truman told [\[Sidney\] Souers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Souers) on January 19 that the JCS memorandum "made a lot of sense and that he was inclined to think that was what we should do." When the Special Committee came in on January 31 to recommend to him that the nation proceed with the Super, Lilienthal was prepared to argue at length that the policy was not wise. Truman cut short the discussion. "What the hell are we waiting for?" he remembered telling them. "Let's get on with it." The President announced to the world the same day that he was directing "the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb.”
> 
> Certainly Truman learned from the months of debate within the government, but he may have learned only that a decision was urgent politically: that *the military and a vocal, organized segment of Congress would fight him if he decided not to build the Super*. Authoritative contemporary testimony affirms that *his decision to build the hydrogen bomb was never in doubt in the first place, that the painful debates of autumn 1949 that left such a gulf of bitter division among American scientists were little more than a White House public-relations ploy*. "The White House," Sidney Souers confirmed in 1954 when the events were still fresh in memory, "felt it was necessary to show the country that the President used an orderly process in arriving at his decisions, not snap judgments, which he has been accused of." Even so, Souers went on, "*I am sure \[the President's\] mind was made up at the very beginning*."
> 
> Eben Ayers, Truman's assistant press secretary, confirms Sours's impression in his contemporary diary:

> February 4 \[1950\].... *The president said there actually was no decision to make on the H-bomb. He said this really was a question that was settled in making up the budget for the atomic energy commission last fall when $300 million was allotted.* He said he had discussed that last September with David Lilienthal... Acheson... and Johnson. He went on to say that we had to do it—make the \[H-\]bomb - though no one wants to use it. But, he said, we have got to have it if only for bargaining purposes with the Russians.

> Truman had consoled Lilienthal in similar terms back in early November, when the two men had discussed who to appoint to succeed Lilienthal as AEC chairman. "We don't want a military-minded civilian," Lilienthal quotes Truman saying; "he must be someone who sees the necessary military setting, how it fits in, but he must be someone who doesn't regard that as our objective-and we're going to use this for peace and never use it for war— I've always said this, and you'll see. *It'll be like poison gas (never used again)*." Truman thus began what became a US presidential tradition of maintaining and enlarging a threatening nuclear arsenal he had no intention of using except for political leverage in international negotiations.
> 
> But that was not the worst result of the January 1950 decision. "I never forgave Truman," Rabi would identify the greater danger. "... He simply did not understand what it was about.... *For him to have alerted the world that we were going to make a hydrogen bomb at a time when we didn't even know how to make one was one of the worst things he could have done*."

Again (echoing Acheson-Lilienthal report), the scientists had proposed a plan to stop escalation, which was ignored because US leaders were unwilling to give up their advantage over the Soviet Union[^912s3m1aqql][^9js00xh0tr8].

The Race
--------

> We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.

\- Robert Oppenheimer (part 3 title page)

Having chosen the route of proliferation, the race was on. In hindsight we can see how paranoid the military was at the time[^af9vajm0z3u]:

> While Los Alamos scraped its way to the bare realities, alarmist prognostications further terrorized Washington. Brigadier General [Herbert B. Loper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Loper), a member of the \[Military Liaison Committee of the United States Atomic Energy Commission\], disturbed by the Fuchs revelations, sat himself down and proceeded to estimate what he called "a measure of the outside bracket of Russian capabilities" on the assumption that the Soviets had begun "a nuclear energy development project" by 1943 at the latest that had benefited from espionage. To get to his "outside bracket," Loper assumed (despite good CIA information to the contrary from returning German scientists and engineers who had been Soviet prisoners of war) that the Soviets had begun exploring and mining in 1943 and had begun building isotope-separation and reactor facilities in 1945. It might follow, he thought, that the Soviets had established "the theoretical basis for developing the thermonuclear weapon" by 1945 and had tested an atomic and a thermonuclear weapon before the Joe 1 test that the US detected in September 1949. If so, the brigadier general concluded sensationally, then "the USSR stockpile and current production capacity (might be\] equal or actually superior to our own, both as to yields and numbers," and "the thermonuclear weapon may be in actual production."

In reality, “the Soviet atomic bomb stockpile at the *end* of 1950 \[...\] consisted of five RDS-1 plutonium implosion bombs; the US stockpile at the end of 1950 totaled 298 engineered, levitated composite weapons. Neither country had thermonuclear weapons at this time.”

Aside: the Taiwan thing almost happened in 1950[^keesmihwm9k]:

> [Kim \[Il Sung\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Il_Sung) saw Mao in May and began masterfully to play off the two Communist leaders \[Mao and Stalin\] each against the other. Mao at that time was planning an invasion of Taiwan, for which he had a promise of Soviet support. (Truman had announced on January 5 that the US would not intervene in Taiwan, a point Mao had taken to heart.) If Mao expressed fear that the US would defend South Korea, he would have to admit the possibility that the US would also defend Taiwan, in which case the Soviets would certainly back away from their promise. Rather than take that risk, Mao tepidly endorsed Kim's adventure. The Korean leader probably exaggerated the temperature of Mao's endorsement when he communicated it to Moscow. Stalin had already started sending Kim weapons; they "began to arrive in huge numbers at the port of Chongjin" in April, says a North Korean general. Now Stalin signaled his approval of Kim's war of liberation by dispatching a team of Soviet advisers to Pyongyang. The Chinese leadership felt betrayed by Stalin's alliance with Kim Il Sung. Dogged by delays, Mao was forced to put his Taiwan invasion on hold -- permanently, as it turned out. If there had not been a Korean war in the summer of 1950 there might well have been a Chinese war between the United States and the People's Republic of China.

By 1951, Oppenheimer had changed his position on pursuing the hydrogen bomb[^c32rdoitspi]:

> It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it; there were some debates about what to do with it after it was made. I cannot very well imagine if we had known in late 1949 what we got to know by early 1951 that the tone of our (October 1949 GAC) report would have been the same.

He seems to have changed his mind based on solely technical reasons, yet his earlier statements (at least the ones I’ve seen) are based on strategy and morality, and I don’t see what about those aspects should have changed. Rhodes: “Why technical promise should decide questions of politics and morality, Oppenheimer did not explain, but he said on the same occasion that the world would be a safer place if the development of thermonuclear weapons could have been avoided, and he knew very well that Soviet scientists were as capable of brewing something technically sweet as US scientists had been.” [^tjxifiml0bs]

Teller
------

I had known Edward Teller as “father of the hydrogen bomb”. So I was surprised that he didn’t play a larger role in this book. He generally comes across as very childish and petty. Here’s one representative example[^1qj85kermw6][^0805y2paqr2m]:

> No one else who attended the meeting… shared Teller’s melodramatic recollection… Edward got tremendously impatient and made it impossible for anybody else to complete the job. It was expected that Edward would appear there *after* this presentation, but he more or less short-circuited the thing by starting to talk before

Even back at the Manhattan Project, Teller was hard to direct. He was supposed to be working on implosion but was distracted by fusion, so Oppenheimer allowed him to do his own thing.

Teller became known as “father of the hydrogen bomb”, when in fact, if anyone deserves credit (not that I think it’s something to be proud of), it’s probably Stanislaw Ulam. He co-invented Monte Carlo methods with von Neumann. Then in 1949, ‘Ulam had lost patience with Teller’s assaults on Los Alamos’s dedication to Tuper work. “Teller… kept insisting on certain special approaches of his own,” Ulam writes.’ He worked with his wife and Cornelius Everett to actually work out the calculations and show that Teller’s design wouldn’t work.

Then in January 1951 (quoting Ulam’s wife Françoise)[^y7ie7i4m91]:

> Engraved on my memory is the day when I found him at noon staring intensely out of a window in our living room with a very strange expression on his face. Peering unseeing into the garden, he said, “I found a way to make it work.” “What work?” I asked. “The Super,” he replied. “It is a totally different scheme, and it will change the course of history.”

Ulam took his design to Teller[^uq21msoihd]:

> “For the first half an hour or so during our conversation,” Ulam continues, “\[Teller\] did not want to accept this new possibility…” But “after a few hours,” Teller “took up \[Ulam’s\] suggestions, hesitantly at first,” then “enthusiastically.”

Different observers see the relative contribution of Ulam and Teller differently. [Herbert York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_York):

> What Ulam did was not a thermonuclear device. It was a general idea. What Teller did was convert that into something which was a sketch of a Super that would work. Teller sketched out a super bomb. Ulam simply presented a fairly general idea in dealing with that topic. I think Teller has Slighted Ulam, but I think also Teller does deserve fifty-one percent of the credit.

[J. Rud Nielsen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Rud_Nielsen):

> \[Bohr\] told me what Teller’s contribution to the design of the hydrogen bomb was. When I asked him how great a contribution this was, he answered: “Old physicists who have turned administrators might not think of this solution. However, if you asked a good class of physics students, two or three of them would have suggested this solution.”

Teller was hardly involved in the actual development of the bomb[^fq7z0tvjnvw]:

> Edward Teller spent only two weeks at Los Alamos in the crucial six months between October 1951 and April 1952 when the equilibrium thermonuclear was designed; his main contribution seems to have been to kibitz. "Once Teller left Los Alamos," Hans Bethe observes, "even though they were working on 'his' weapon, he found all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't work. He hated the project director, Marshall Holloway.... So he had every reason, he tried to criticize it wherever possible."

Thomas Powers: "of course the bomb designers all knew the truth, and many considered Teller the lowest, most contemptible kind of offender in the world of science, a stealer of credit".

Mike and Bravo
--------------

After the 1951 Teller-Ulam breakthrough, Teller pushed for a July 1952 first test, but it was decided to aim for October instead, though as the date approached, the test was almost postponed[^jlkyooz60c]:

> Vannevar Bush went directly to Dean Acheson in the spring of the year to propose postponing Mike. Nineteen fifty-two was a presidential election year. After losing the New Hampshire primary, Truman had decided not to run and had endorsed Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois, as the Democratic candidate; the Republicans reluctantly chose Dwight Eisenhower. The November election would be held only three days after the Mike shot. "I felt that it was utterly improper," Bush testified, "… for that test to be conducted just before \[the\] election, to confront an incoming President with an accomplished test for which he would carry the full responsibility hereafter. For that test marked our entry into a very disagreeable type of world." Bush's second reason for proposing that Mike be postponed was even more compelling:
> 
> I felt strongly that that test ended the possibility of the only type of agreement that I thought was possible with Russia at that time, namely, an agreement to make no more tests. For that kind of an agreement would have been self-policing in the sense that if it was violated, the violation would be immediately known... I think history will show that was a turning point... land) that those who pushed that thing through to a conclusion without making that attempt have a great deal to answer for.

Regular atomic bombs were already terrible enough. For context, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were estimated to yield 15kt and 21kt, respectively[^jiix5ap4qgi]. Big enough to wipe out a city and kill on the order of 100,000 at a time. But I want to emphasize just how much bigger thermonuclear bombs are. The largest US test, Castle Bravo, had an estimated yield of 15Mt, roughly *1000* times more energy than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Its fireball alone was 4 miles in diameter. The largest Soviet test was even larger, at 50-58Mt[^8qa2rnbjrka]. Some more detail on Castle Bravo[^ykg8s2nrtf]:

> On March 1, Los Alamos and Livermore initiated a new thermonuclear test series at Bikini, Castle, exploding the first lithium-deuteride-fueled US thermonuclear, a Los Alamos device called Shrimp tested as Castle Bravo.
> 
> The room-temperature Shrimp device used lithium enriched to 40 percent lithium-6; it weighed a relatively portable 23,500 pounds and had been designed to fit the bomb bay of a B-47 when it was weaponized. It was expected to yield about five megatons, but the group at Los Alamos that had measured lithium fusion cross sections had used a technique that missed an important fusion reaction in lithium-7, the other 60 percent of the Shrimp lithium fuel component. "They really didn't know," Harold Agnew explains, "that with lithium there was an n, 2n reaction \[i.e., one neutron entering a lithium nucleus knocked two neutrons out\]. They missed it entirely. That's why Shrimp went like gangbusters." Bravo exploded with a yield of fifteen megatons, the largest-yield thermonuclear device the US ever tested. "When the two neutrons come out," says Agnew, "then you have lithium and it went like regular lithium-6. Shrimp was so much bigger than it was supposed to be because we were wrong about the cross section."
> 
> This time the fireball expanded to nearly *four miles in diameter*. It engulfed its 7,500-foot diagnostic pipe array all the way out to the earth-banked instrument bunker, which barely survived. It trapped people in experiment bunkers well outside the expected limits of its effects and menaced task force ships far out at sea. "I was on a ship that was thirty miles away," Marshall Rosenbluth remembers, "and we had this horrible white stuff raining out on us. I got 10 rads[^ibi9akbgbvr] of radiation from it. It was pretty frightening. There was a huge fireball with these turbulent rolls going in and out. The thing was glowing. It looked to me like a diseased brain up in the sky. It spread until the edge of it looked as if it was almost directly overhead. *It was a much more awesome sight than a puny little atomic bomb*. It was a pretty sobering and shattering experience." Bravo vaporized a crater 250 feet deep and 6,500 feet in diameter out of the atoll rock; Rosenbluth's horrible white stuff" was calcium precipitated from vaporized coral.

This is slightly out of chronological order, but let’s quickly fast-forward to November 22, 1955, to the [Soviet Union’s first thermonuclear test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDS-37), for another look at what a thermonuclear detonation is like[^h4eiuaiwyf8]:

> [Victor Adamsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Adamsky) remembers the shock wave from the new thermonuclear racing across the steppe toward the observers. "It was a front of moving air that you could see that differed in quality from the air before and after. It came, it was really terrible; the grass was covered with frost and the moving front thawed it, you felt it melting as it approached you." Igor Kurcharov walked in to ground zero with Yuli Khariton after the test and was horrified to see the earth cratered even though the bomb had detonated above ten thousand feet. "That was such a terrible, monstrous sight," he told Anaroli Alexandrov when he returned to Moscow. "That weapon must not be allowed ever to be used."

The Cold War
------------

Now that the US had committed to nuclear supremacy, the US and USSR began to build up their stockpiles. “298 bombs in 1950 became 2,422 nuclear weapons in 1955. By 1961 there were 18,638 nuclear weapons in the US arsenal; by 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis, 27,100.”[^nryyx3zmgx]

There have been [far too many times when we got lucky to avoid a nuclear exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls). One example I hadn’t heard, from when the US was rushing to set up Minutemen missiles during the Cuban missile crisis[^xrgi12jsi2]:

> The US's first squadron of Minutemen I solid-fuel missiles was undergoing testing and certification prior to deployment at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana when the missile crisis began. SAC, the Air Force Systems Command and contractor personnel worked nonstop to ready the Minutemen for launch. A declassified history of the missile wing reports that "lack of equipment, both standard and test, required many work-arounds." The first Minuteman was up on October 26; five had been made operational by October 30. But miswiring, wire shorts and other problems left the missiles capable of being accidentally armed; one had to be shut down and restarted five times because its guidance and control systems failed, and all ten Minutemen at Malmstrom had to be taken off alert repeatedly for repair in the course of the crisis. Missiles did not have PAL locks in 1962; for safety and control, launch required redundant, coordinated keying by four officers in two physically separate launch control centers. The Malmstrom work-around overrode that safety system. One officer who controlled the Minutemen during the missile crisis told nuclear safety expert Scott Sagan, "We didn't literally ‘hot wire' the launch command system — that would be the wrong analogy — but we did have a second key....*I could have launched it on my own, if I had wanted to."* An Air Force safety inspection report noted after the crisis that "possible malfunctions of automated equipment... posed serious hazards (including, accidental launch.." Another possibility that the inspectors chose not to mention was unauthorized launch.

Both the US and Soviet leaders had a similar attitude towards their weapons. Both sides considered them too horrible to contemplate using.

[Nikita Khrushchev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev)[^8638i74q3oo]:

> *When I was appointed First Secretary of the Central Committee and learned all the facts about nuclear power, I couldn't sleep for several days*. Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons, and when I realized that, I was able to sleep again.

Dwight Eisenhower in response to South Korean president [Syngman Rhee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee) asking for America’s backing in war[^mjkkfrtv2jh]:

> There is no disposition in America at any time to belittle the Republic of Korea. But when you say that we should deliberately plunge into war, let me tell you that if war comes, it will be horrible. Atomic war will destroy civilization. It will destroy our cities. There will be millions of people dead.
> 
> War today is unthinkable with the weapons which we have at our command. If the Kremlin and Washington ever lock up in a war, the results are too horrible to contemplate. I can't even imagine them. But we must keep strong. I assure you that we think about these things continuously and as seriously as you do. The kind of war that I am talking about, if carried out, would not save democracy. *Civilization would be ruined, and those nations and persons that survived would have to have strong dictators over them just to feed the people who were left. That is why we are opposed to war*.

Miroslav Nincic in *The Arms Race: The Political Economy of Military Growth*, 1982[^74z6430j82f]:

> US and Soviet levels of defense spending were only weakly coupled at best. Far more influential on the US side were such domestic political phenomena as competition among the military services, coalitions of scientific and industrial organizations promoting new techno-logies, the pressure of "defense" as a political issue and defense spending to prime the economic pump, particularly in election years. Similar patterns obtained along somewhat different lines for the Soviet command economy.
> 
> "The arms race," Nincic summarized, "is imbedded in circumstances proper to the domestic political and economic systems of the superpowers in addition to dynamics inherent in the interaction between the two nations." Having worked the numbers, Nincic concluded that all the high claptrap of arms strategy was essentially decorative: "Strategic doctrines are designed, in large part, to justify the weaponry that the arms race has imposed on both the United States and the Soviet Union." Which is independent confirmation of John Manley's dictum that in Washington (and in Moscow), "You don't do staff work and then make a decision. You make a decision and then do the staff work."

Conclusion
----------

> Knowing that it was going to work sure encouraged those people to go ahead and do it. Particularly because now, whether you believed that it was a good idea or not, the fact that that power was available — *anyone who has a realistic view of the way power gets used by governments would know that you had to do it*. *There was no longer an option. Despite all the debates, no responsible government would ever voluntarily forgo developing a very powerful new weapon if it knew how to do it. That is something that you can talk about if you're not in the government, but if you are in the government it is not an option*.

\- [George Cowan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cowan) [^8sj6hr1e6jo]

> Teller… still thought the Acheson-Lilienthal Report was the only "honest and effective" arms control proposal anyone had ever made.[^0pwnmh04vcm]

> Fundamentally, and in the long run, the problem which is posed by the release of atomic energy is a problem of the ability of the human race to govern itself without war. There is no permanent method of excising atomic energy from our affairs, now that men know how it can be released. Even if some reasonably complete international control of atomic energy should be established, knowledge would persist, and it is hard to see how there could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually make and use atomic bombs. In this respect the problem of armaments was permanently and drastically altered in 1945.[^h0tl0g0z5lv]

The story of the hydrogen bomb has been sobering and full of moments I wish we could turn back to and try again. What if the Acheson-Lilienthal plan had succeeded at the UN? What if Truman had followed the advice of the General Advisory Council to not build the super? Maybe the nuclear buildup could have been avoided. On the other hand, maybe the buildup (and logic of deterrence) really is the reason there’s been no major war since nuclear weapons were invented.

My biggest lessons would have to be:

*   Leaders reliably choose the least risky option, which is convenient in the moment, but may not resolve the underlying problem and might lead to more problems in the future. We saw this with both the Acheson-Lilienthal plan and the decision to pursue the super program. Outside of the context of the book, there are abundant examples, but two that feel especially salient to me are all of the unresolved questions after the Yalta conference concerning the end of WWII[^vg3nbhbk3n] and more recently, the US and other governments repeatedly choosing to take on more debt without a plan for paying it off.
*   Decision makers may ask for the opinions of experts and scientists, but that doesn't mean the expert advice will be followed. Other voices may be louder (the Joint Chiefs of Staff vs the GAC), or the real decision maker may have already made up their mind (e.g. Truman's pre-decision to pursue the super).

[^an4hg46klpr]: That is, useful for both civilian and military purposes. 

[^6086bynau95]: p 95 

[^ejyfm1baew]: All emphasis, in this quote and others, my own. 

[^vc9vqsbo55e]: pp 96-97 

[^aykutvisql6]: p 98-100 

[^c3610n7ljqp]: p 121 

[^phi6wuzfirk]: The Baruch Plan and the Origins of the Cold War 

[^7xjb9bg509p]: From Truman to Roosevelt Roundtable Review 

[^zqyoee65r6r]: Glenn T. Seaborg, James B. Conant, Hartley Rowe, Cyril Stanley Smith, L. A. DuBridge, Oliver Ellsworth Buckley, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and I. I. Rabi 

[^hgxb1gjejza]: Seaborg had been invited to Sweden to lecture: “They wanted to look me over for a Nobel. I wasn’t about to miss that, so I went.” 

[^tj4fqzkdo8]: Industrial engineer Hartley Rowe (p 397), who had worked on the Manhattan Project and served on the GAC:It was a pretty soul-searching time, and I had rather definite views....I may be an idealist, but I can't see [how]... any people can go from one engine of destruction to another, each of them a thousand times greater in potential destruction, and still retain any normal perspective in regard to their relationships with other countries and also in relationship with peace.... If a commensurate effort had been made to come to some understanding with the nations of the world, we might have avoided the development. 

[^y8la7dpsrfg]: The line between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons is murky, but tactical weapons generally have a smaller yield and are designed for situations where friendly forces may be nearby. 

[^vmj0ixsfb7c]: Conant, Rowe, Smith, DuBridge, Buckley, and Oppenheimer 

[^azf2j033zlc]: Fermi and Rabi 

[^4adl8b3rn02]: pp 401-402 

[^lrsd7z3ua3a]: p 407 

[^912s3m1aqql]: That said, though I hate living in a world with MAD and thermonuclear weapons, Truman was right: they have never been used again (for now!). We don’t know what counterfactually would have happened, but the period since WWII has been perhaps the most peaceful in history. 

[^9js00xh0tr8]: My best counter-argument to this is: why should I expect the scientists to even have a say? The Joint Chiefs are supposed to be the experts in strategy / defense 

[^af9vajm0z3u]: p 420 

[^keesmihwm9k]: pp 435-436 

[^c32rdoitspi]: p 476 

[^tjxifiml0bs]: There’s this understandable temptation to ignore the real-world impact of a thing you’re building: to just focus on the technology, ignoring everything else (because to think through all of its potential impacts will slow you down and might even prevent you from building the thing at all, which is no fun). I’m not sure how explicitly I want to make this about AI, but I’ll just say that if you believe you’re working on the most important technology humankind has or will ever invent, then you really ought to be thinking hard about societal impacts. 

[^1qj85kermw6]: Carson Mark, p 475 

[^0805y2paqr2m]: A more extreme example: In 1979 he signed a two-page ad in The Washington Post with the headline “I was the only victim of Three-Mile Island”, blaming actress Jane Fonda for giving him a heart attack. 

[^y7ie7i4m91]: p 463 

[^uq21msoihd]: p 466 

[^fq7z0tvjnvw]: p 486 

[^jlkyooz60c]: p 497 

[^jiix5ap4qgi]: John Malik The Yields of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Nuclear Explosions 

[^8qa2rnbjrka]: This was the infamous Tsar Bomba, tested at half its design yield of 100Mt 

[^ykg8s2nrtf]: pp 541 - 542 

[^ibi9akbgbvr]: Footnote from the book: A chest-X-ray series is equivalent to about 1 rad. -- RR 

[^h4eiuaiwyf8]: p 569 

[^nryyx3zmgx]: p 562 

[^xrgi12jsi2]: p 573 

[^8638i74q3oo]: p 583 

[^mjkkfrtv2jh]: p 584 

[^74z6430j82f]: p 586 

[^8sj6hr1e6jo]: p 470 

[^0pwnmh04vcm]: p 578 

[^h0tl0g0z5lv]: p 588 

[^vg3nbhbk3n]: For example:“Free and unfettered elections” for Poland was not specific enough, and in reality meant elections delayed until 1947, and a communist-dominated government until then.They decided on Poland’s eastern border, but not the western border, and the permanent border was only later agreed upon after being unilaterally imposed by Soviet / Polish forces (at the expense of Germany).The future status of Germany and Berlin, which resulted in Germany being divided and the Berlin airlift when the US and UK had no land access to their sectors of Berlin.etc