![]() ![]() However, the report also concluded that considerable resources would be needed to develop the Super Bomb and there was no estimates of how much the project would cost or how long it would take to succeed. The report judged that the theoretical design submitted to the conference was on the whole “workable” and that the development of a hydrogen bomb was in fact feasible. Emil Klaus Fuchs who, as it was later learned, was passing on what he knew about atomic research to the Soviet Union. Among those who attended the conference were Manhattan Project scientists Edward Teller, John Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam. The other line of research had the much more difficult task of igniting a relatively large mass of thermonuclear fuel by means of a relatively small fission explosion.Ī report on the status of physicists’ understanding of the thermonuclear process as of spring 1946 was published in June of that year and was titled “Report of Conference on the Super”. One such line explored the comparatively simple objective of igniting a relatively small mass of thermonuclear fuel by means of the energy produced in a relatively large fission explosion–what would later become known as “boosting” or the “booster principle”. The research soon branched out into two distinct lines. In the spring of 1946, the physicists who had remained at Los Alamos after the war had ended once again took up the study of how thermonuclear reactions might be produced on earth. Nonetheless, a small group of theoretical physicists under the direction of Edward Teller made a substantial effort to explore the prospects of a thermonuclear bomb during the war. However, because the development of fission bombs turned out to be more difficult than expected, their development required and received the full attention of the Laboratory. When Los Alamos was established, the exploration of the hydrogen bomb was among the original objectives. He speculated that reactions involving deuterons, the nuclei of the naturally occurring heavy form of hydrogen, would react explosively together under the enormous temperatures created during an atomic explosion and would produce helium and huge amounts of energy. In 1942, after creating the first nuclear chain reaction on earth at the Met Lab in Chicago, Enrico Fermi supposed that the fission process that occurred within an atomic bomb could be used to ignite the same sort of thermonuclear reaction that took place inside the center of the sun. ![]() At the center of an exploding fission bomb, temperatures exceeding 100,000,000 degrees are produced, and so it was realized that at least one of the conditions necessary for igniting a thermonuclear reaction was possible. The advent of the atomic bomb dramatically altered the prospects for producing a hydrogen bomb. However, many believed that these conditions were impossible to recreate on earth and, as a result, few scientists had given much thought to producing such reactions in a laboratory. During the 1930s, Hans Bethe investigated this phenomenon and suggested that the sun and other stars derived their energy from a set of thermonuclear reactions that took place under enormously high pressures and temperatures believed to prevail in the center of the stars. In the early 20th century it was recognized that stars probably obtained their enormous output of energy from some sort of nuclear process. In addition to the research and development of fission weapons during the Manhattan Project, theoretical work on the hydrogen bomb had also begun. ![]() The Hydrogen Bomb and the Manhattan Project Thus began the vast expansion of the nuclear weapons complex that eventually had operations in some thirty-two states. Because of the increasing range of Soviet aircraft, the Commission ruled out expanding Hanford but preferred distant sites in the South and Ohio River region. du Pont de Nemours and Company, asking DuPont to undertake the design, construction and operation of a new site to produce plutonium and tritium, a necessary ingredient for the thermonuclear bomb. Nonetheless, on July 25, 1950, President Harry Truman wrote to Crawford H. At the time, David Lilienthal, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, had strong reservations about pursuing the “Super” or thermonuclear bomb. In January 1950, President Truman made the controversial decision to continue and intensify research and production of thermonuclear weapons.
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