The hell bomb

by William L. Laurence

This forecast is not based on merely guesswork. When we decided to go all out in developing the A-bomb—and we didn’t really go to work in earnest until May 1943—nobody knew that it could be successfully made. There were two enormous major problems to be solved, and solved in time to be of use in winning the war. One was to produce unheard-of quantities of fissionable materials (U-235 and plutonium), literally in quantities billions of times greater than had ever been produced before. Nobody knew whether it could be done or how it could be done. Three gigantic plants were built, at a cost of $1,500,000,000, on the mere chance, “calculated risk” we called it, that one of them would work. As it turned out, they all worked, some more efficiently than others, though all contributed to the shortening of the war. The second major problem, among a host of smaller ones, all important to the successful attainment of the goal, was how to assemble the materials produced in the billion-dollar plants into a bomb that would live up to expectations. Both major problems had to be solved simultaneously. The designing of the bomb went on for more than two years with only trickles of the active material.

Yet despite all these enormous difficulties the A-bomb was completed for testing in about two years and three months after the beginning of the large-scale effort. Compared with the enormousness of the problems that had to be solved, and were solved successfully in this remarkably short time, the problems still to be solved for building the hydrogen bomb appear relatively simple, since all the materials required and the plants to produce them are already built, paid for, and operating successfully. As already pointed out, we have the A-bombs to serve as triggers, large stockpiles of deuterium, and the refrigeration equipment and techniques to liquefy it. We have an adequate supply of lithium for the production of tritium, which, as explained earlier, would be used as the extra kindling to the A-bomb match. And we have, of course, our gigantic plutonium factories at Hanford, Washington, in which the lithium could be converted into tritium in the desired amounts.

Thus, instead of having to start from scratch as we were forced to do with the A-bomb, we have at hand all the necessary ingredients for the H-bomb with the possible exception of sufficient tritium, and since we have the plutonium plants, greatly expanded and improved since the end of the war, it is reasonable to make a “guestimate,” to use a word popular in wartime, that a few months should suffice for them, if they are employed exclusively for that purpose, to produce tritium in proper amounts.

That we have decided to complete the construction of the H-bomb in the shortest possible time was made clear on July 7, two weeks following the Communist attack on South Korea, when President Truman asked Congress to furnish $260,000,000 in cash “to build additional and more efficient plants and related facilities” for materials that can be used either for weapons or for fuels potentially useful for power purposes. The appropriation, he said, was required “in furtherance of my directive of January 31, 1950,” in which he had ordered the Atomic Energy Commission “to continue its work on the so-called hydrogen bomb”; and this was further clarified in a letter to the President by the Budget Director, Frederick J. Lawton, recommending the money request, to the effect that the materials to be produced in the proposed plants could be used for either atomic bombs or hydrogen bombs. Since the only type of plant that could produce materials for both the A-bomb and the H-bomb is a nuclear reactor for producing plutonium, and since tritium is the only H-bomb element that could be produced in a plutonium plant, the request by the President may be interpreted as the first, though indirect, official confirmation that tritium is looked upon as one of the ingredients necessary for a successful H-bomb. We were given a hint of a possible time-table when it was revealed that the all-cash request would have to be obligated in one year though its actual disbursal could be spread over four years. This suggests the possibility that the nuclear reactors for the large-scale production of tritium might be rushed to completion within one year.

While these new reactors for the production of tritium are being built, we can convert all our Hanford reactors for that purpose so that no time need be lost. Whatever amounts of plutonium would have to be sacrificed by diverting the Hanford plants from plutonium to tritium would be offset by the new uranium concentration plants at Oak Ridge, and by the fact that we already have a large stockpile of both U-235 and plutonium accumulated over a period of five years.

The one and only major problem to be solved is how to assemble into an efficient H-bomb the materials we already have at hand or will have in a few months. Here, too, we are much farther advanced than we were at the time we decided to build the A-bomb, as we are not called upon to start from scratch. For whereas in the early days of the A-bomb development scientists were doubtful whether it could be made at all and were actually hoping that their investigations would prove that it was impossible, for the Nazis as well as for us, no such doubts seem to exist in the minds of those most intimately associated with the problem. On this score we have had more than hints from a number of those in the know, among them Senator McMahon. “The scientists,” he said in a historic address to the United States Senate on February 2, 1950, “feel more confident that this most horrible of armaments [the hydrogen bomb] can be developed successfully than they felt in 1940 when the original bomb was under consideration. The hydrogen development will be cheaper than its uranium forerunner. Theoretically, it is without limit in destructive capacity. A weapon made of such material would destroy any military or other target, including the largest city on earth.”

What is this confidence based on? Scientists are a very conservative lot, not given to jumping to conclusions without experimental evidence on which to base them. I remember well the agonizing hours preceding the test of the first A-bomb in New Mexico, when everyone present, particularly the intellectual hierarchy that was most responsible, was beset by grave doubts whether the A-bomb would go off at all, and if it did, whether it would live up to expectations or turn out to be no more than an improved blockbuster. Very few, if any, felt confident that it would be as good as it finally turned out to be. For example, in a pool in which everyone bet a dollar to guess the ultimate power of the bomb in terms of TNT, Dr. Oppenheimer placed his bet on 300 tons. This makes it evident that the scientists were not very confident even as late as 1945, up to the very last minute, when “the brain child of many minds came forth in physical shape and performed as it was supposed to do.”

If the scientists are more confident today than they were in 1940, and even, it would seem, in 1945, when the bomb stood on its steel tower ready for its first test, it can only mean that their confidence is based on innumerable experiments carried out during the five years that have elapsed since Hiroshima. By the semiannual reports to Congress by the Atomic Energy Commission, and reports presented before the American Physical Society, or published in official publications, by members of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and other leading institutions, we have been officially informed of many experiments that have been carried out on nuclear reactions between deuterons and deuterons, tritons and tritons, and deuterons and tritons—namely, the very reactions to be expected in an H-bomb using deuterium, tritium, or a mixture of the two. This makes it obvious that during the five years since Hiroshima we have accumulated a vast body of knowledge about the reactions necessary for a successful H-bomb. Furthermore, this gives us the assurance that we are five years ahead of Russia on the H-bomb as well as the A-bomb, since we have had plutonium plants in which to make tritium for at least five years, whereas she has just placed her plutonium plants in operation and, as we have seen, can ill afford to sacrifice the vital plutonium she needs for building up her A-bomb stockpile to begin experiments we had most likely carried out five years ago.

The best evidence so far that we have made much progress during the past five years on the design of the H-bomb—evidence strongly indicating that it had passed the blueprint stage and was ready for construction—was supplied recently by Lewis L. Strauss, a member of the original Atomic Energy Commission, when he revealed that “the greatest issue of division” (between himself and other members of the AEC) “was whether or not to proceed with the hydrogen bomb, as for some time I had strongly urged to do.” Now, Strauss, who went into the Navy in World War II as a lieutenant commander and rose to be a rear admiral, is a leading financier of wide experience, so it may be taken for granted that if for some time he had “strongly urged” proceeding with the hydrogen bomb, it must have been because he had been assured by the scientific experts that it was feasible. Men of his background and experience do not “strongly urge” the diversion of resources to projects unless they are strongly convinced that the project is both practical and feasible. His words, when read in the light of statements by other members of the AEC, suggest that the division of opinion on this score among the members of the Commission was not over the feasibility of the H-bomb but over the belief that the A-bomb was good enough as long as we were its sole possessors and that we could maintain our advantage for a long time by building more and better A-bombs.

On the other hand, the fact that the majority of the AEC did not agree with Strauss on the necessity of proceeding with the hydrogen bomb must certainly not be interpreted to mean that they halted all studies on the subject, for that would be charging them with gross negligence. It is much more reasonable to assume that the “greatest issue of division” (mark the use of the word “greatest,” which indicates many a heated debate) was whether or not to proceed at once with the actual building of the bomb, after it had been fully designed and shown to be feasible in a host of painstaking studies over a period of at least four years.