Dark Sun : The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (9781439126479) by Rhodes Richard

Author:Rhodes, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

20

‘Gung-ho for the Super’

WENDELL LATIMER, the Berkeley chemistry dean, remembered that he “really got concerned” about the United States’s military position after the Soviet Union tested Joe 1.1751 On October 5, 1949, the same day Lewis Strauss in Washington proposed a “quantum jump” in nuclear firepower to his fellow commissioners on the AEC, Latimer discussed his concern with Luis Alvarez, Ernest Lawrence’s protégé at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. Alvarez, a prolific and successful inventor as well as a physicist of Nobel Prize caliber, decided to start a diary that Wednesday, as he had done in the early days of Second World War radar research, for history and to establish patent priorities should inventions turn up along the way. “Latimer and I independently thought that the Russians could be working hard on the super,” Alvarez opened his diary, “and might get there ahead of us. The only thing to do seems to be to get there first—but hope that will turn out to be impossible.”1752 Fundamental physical principles might make a thermonuclear impossible, that is, but if such a weapon could be built, Latimer and Alvarez believed the US should build it before the Soviet Union.

The next day, Latimer recalls, he “got hold of Ernest Lawrence and I said, ‘Listen, we have to do something about it.’ . . . I saw Ernest Lawrence in the Faculty Club on the campus.”1753 Apparently Latimer advised Lawrence to explore the question with Alvarez; the Nobel laureate physicist dropped by Alvarez’s office at the Radiation Laboratory that same afternoon. “Talked with E.O.L. about the project,” Alvarez noted in his diary afterward, “and he took it very seriously—in fact he had just come from a session with Latimer. We called up Teller at Los Alamos to find out how the theory had progressed in the last four years.”1754 Teller was excited to hear that two such influential colleagues were interested in the thermonuclear, but since the project was secret, he could say little on the phone. Lawrence happened to be traveling east that weekend for a meeting in Washington on Sunday of a panel on radiological warfare—”a subject,” writes Alvarez, “which was very close to . . . Lawrence’s heart.”1755 The Radiation Laboratory director asked Alvarez to join him and proposed they detour through Los Alamos to talk to Teller. The two men left San Francisco that evening and landed in Albuquerque at three A.M. The next morning they flew up to Los Alamos.

At the weapons laboratory that Friday, Lawrence and Alvarez talked with Teller, Associate Director John Manley, Stanislaw Ulam and visiting Russian emigré theoretical physicist George Gamow. “They give [the] project [a] good chance if there is plenty of tritium available,” Alvarez noted in his diary. “There must be a lot of machine calculations done to check the hydrodynamics, and Princeton and L.A. are getting their machines ready.”1756 The machines Alvarez and Lawrence heard about were more capacious, all-electronic successors to the ENIAC computer, one being built at John von Neumann’s direction at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a copy under construction at Los Alamos.

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