Read Sun in a Bottle for Free Online

fusion hawk, wrote a second report “in a very different tone” to counteract Bradbury’s negativity. But there was little way to put a positive spin on the status of the Super. The project was dead in the water. The deuterium wouldn’t ignite. Teller was devastated. The unlimited power of fusion was slipping away.
    Ironically, it was Ulam, the man who brought Teller to tears, who would lift him out of his despair. Ulam saw a way to build a working fusion weapon. In January 1951, he realized that he could use the stream of particles coming off an atom bomb to compress the hydrogen fuel, making it hot and dense enough to ignite in a fusion reaction. 11 Instead of a simple bomb with a tank of deuterium, the new hydrogen bomb would have an atom bomb primary separated from a deuterium-tritium secondary. Particles from the atom bomb—radiation that would ordinarily stream away from the explosion—could be focused onto the secondary to compress, heat, and ignite it. It would be tricky to engineer such a device, but it seemed to overcome the problems that dogged the classical Super. “Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities,” Ulam reported to von Neumann. “This is perhaps an indication they will not work.” Nevertheless, the enthusiasm was justified. It would mark the end of the dark times for the fusion hawks, and for Teller. By May, Los Alamos would have experimental data to back up the theoretical calculations.
    In the Marshall Islands, isolated in deep Pacific waters, a nearly circular atoll of a few dozen islands had been drafted into the Cold War effort. Since 1948, the United States had used the Eniwetok atoll—some of whose islands were inhabited—for testing nuclear weapons. In April 1951, a new series of tests began. They were code-named Greenhouse.
    Greenhouse consisted of four explosions. The first two, Dog and Easy, tested two of the compact fission weapon designs that Los Alamos was furiously generating to keep the United States one step ahead of the Russians. The third and fourth, George and Item, were entirely different. They were the world’s first fusion devices.
    Greenhouse George was a curious gadget. It wasn’t a design that could ever be dropped on an enemy. It was an enormous cylindrical device with a hole in the center. As the device imploded, radiation would stream out of the hole and strike a small target filled with a few grams of deuterium and tritium. It was a science experiment, not a practical weapon, something with which to study the process of fusion rather than to drop on a city. After all, scientists had never achieved fusion before; Greenhouse George, if it worked, would allow them to see it up close for the first time.
    It worked. On May 9, Teller, slathered in suntan lotion, watched as a mushroom cloud boiled obscenely into the sky. It was a doozy of an explosion: at 225 kilotons it was a record breaker, an order of magnitude bigger than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. George’s fission bomb probably generated about 200 kilotons’ worth of energy. The remaining 25 kilotons came from the tiny capsule of deuterium and tritium. Scientists had finally unleashed the energy of the sun. Fusing a few grams of hydrogen released the same amount of energy as the fission of many kilograms of plutonium or uranium. And Greenhouse Item, the first test of a fission weapon “boosted” by a little dollop of deuterium and tritium at its center, was also a success. Teller’s dream of a weapon of unlimited power was back on track. “Eniwetok would not be large enough for the next one,” he gloated.
    The next month, Teller and some colleagues met in Princeton to report on their success to Oppenheimer’s GAC. The resistance to the fusion bomb—moral and political—crumbled under the evidence provided by the Greenhouse tests. Even Teller admitted that Oppenheimer was enthusiastic about proceeding. “I expected that the General Advisory Committee, and particularly