The hell bomb

by William L. Laurence

Oddly enough, the discovery of the principle that made the atomic bomb possible also brought with it the promise that a “deuterium fire” might, after all, be lighted on earth. Early studies had revealed that the explosion of an atomic bomb, if it lived up to expectations, would generate a central temperature of about 50,000,000 degrees centigrade. Here, at last, was the promise of realization of the impossible—the 50,000,000 degree match.

The men of Los Alamos thus knew that if the atomic bomb they were just completing for its first test worked as they hoped it would, it could be used as the match to light the deuterium fire. They could build a superduper bomb of a thousand times the power of the atomic bomb by incorporating deuterium in the A-bomb, the explosion of which would act as the trigger for the superexplosion. And they also knew that the deuterium bomb held such additional potentialities of terror, beyond its vastly greater blasting and burning power, that the step from the duper to the super would be just as great as the step from TNT to the duper.

The hydrogen bomb, H-bomb, or hell bomb, as the fusion bomb had become popularly known, thus became a reality in the flash of the explosion of the first atomic bomb at 5:30 of the morning of July 16, 1945, on the New Mexico desert. As the men of Los Alamos, of whom I was at that time a privileged member, watched the supramundane light and the apocalyptic mushroom-topped mountain of nuclear fire rising to a height of more than eight miles through the clouds, they did not have to wait until they checked with their measuring instruments to know that a match sparking a flame of about 50,000,000 degrees centigrade had been lighted on earth for the first time. The size of the fire mountain and the end-of-the-world-like thunder that reverberated all around, told the tale better than any puny man-made instruments.

And there in our midst, as we learned only recently, stood a Judas, Klaus Fuchs, a name that “will live in infamy” along with that of other archtraitors of history. By the greatest of ironies, there he was, this spy, standing right in the center of what we believed at the time to be the world’s greatest secret, waiting at that very moment to tell the Russians of our success and how we achieved it. As he confessed five years later, he betrayed to them the most intimate details not only about the A-bomb but about the H-bomb as well—details that he learned as a member of the innermost of inner circles. For, alas, he was a trusted member of the theoretical division, the sanctum sanctorum of Los Alamos. This select group of scientists, behind doubly and triply locked doors, discussed in whispers their ideas about the superduper.

His associates at Los Alamos, who should know, sadly admit that Fuchs made it possible for Russia to develop her A-bomb at least a year ahead of time. It is my own conviction that the information he gave the Russians made it possible for their scientists to attain their goal at least three, and possibly as much as ten, years sooner than they could have done it on their own. Yet, though Fuchs confessed everything he told the Russians, the content of his confession is still kept a top secret from the American people, who sadly need information on one of the greatest problems facing mankind. The reason given is that we cannot actually be sure that Fuchs told the Russians all that he says he did, and, if published, his confession might, by his tricky design, give the Russians additional information. Of course, anything is possible for a warped mind such as that of Fuchs. Nevertheless, it seems highly implausible that this traitor, who went to the Russians voluntarily, should withhold any vital information from them for as long as five years. The best evidence that he didn’t is the Russian A-bomb.

Yet some good comes even of the greatest evil. All the circumstantial evidence points to the fact that during the five-year period following the end of the war our work on the hydrogen bomb had stopped completely. The A-bomb was the mightiest weapon in the world, we seem to have reasoned, and it would take Russia many years before she would get an A-bomb of her own. Why spend great efforts on a superbomb?

The shock when Russia exploded her first A-bomb much sooner than we expected, topped by the second shock that Fuchs had handed Moscow all our major secrets on a platter—including, as must be surmised, those of the H-bomb—awakened us to the facts of life. It is no accident that President Truman’s official announcement of the order to build “the so-called hydrogen bomb or superbomb” came within three days of the announcement of Fuchs’s arrest and confession. The President gave his order with full knowledge of Fuchs’s confession, which made it evident that the Russians were already at work on the hydrogen bomb and had probably been working on it uninterruptedly since 1945. The tragic prospect is that instead of the Russians catching up with us, it is we who may have to catch up with them.

Five years after the first announcement of the explosion of the A-bomb over Hiroshima, even the most intelligent Americans still have only the vaguest idea about the facts. Yet these facts are within the understanding of the average man. If we keep the earlier analogy of the match in mind, it becomes simple to understand the principles underlying both the A-bomb, now more correctly identified as the “fission bomb,” and the hydrogen bomb, more properly described as the “fusion bomb.”

Our principal fuel is coal, which, as everyone knows, is “bottled sunshine,” stored up in plants that grew about two hundred million years ago. When we apply the small amount of heat energy from a match, the bottled energy is released in the form of light and heat, which we can use in a great variety of ways. The point here is that it requires only the application of a very small amount of energy from a match to release a very large amount of energy that has been stored for millions of years in the ancient plants we know as coal.

Now, during the past half century we discovered that the nuclei, or centers, of the smallest units of which the ninety-odd elements of the material universe are made up—units we know as atoms—had stored up within them since the beginning of creation amounts of energy millions of times greater than is stored up by the sun in coal. But we had no match with which to start an atomic fire burning.