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¶ Gamow's interest in stellar reactions led Hans Bethe to calculate systematically all thermonuclear reactions. Says Teller: "Gamow had invented a new kind of game for the physicists, and Bethe proved to be the champion at it."
¶ No scientist expected to be able to arrange thermonuclear reactions similar to those they studied in the stars; the required heat seemed unattainable. In 1938 Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission, and their discovery led directly to the Abomb. And fission, with its intense release of energy, also suggested that conditions could be created under which thermonuclear reactions might occur. The late Enrico Fermi in 1942 suggested to Teller that fission could be used to start thermonuclear reaction in deuterium (heavy hydrogen). "After a few weeks of hard thought," Teller recalls, "I decided that deuterium could not be ignited by atomic bombs."
¶ The same year, Teller went over his reasoning on this point with Emil Konopinski. They found loopholes. Later, after discussions with Oppenheimer and others, Konopinski suggested that tritium be considered instead of deuterium. "At that time it was a mere guess. It turned out to be an inspired one." These discussions were held at Berkeley, where Oppenheimer had gathered a group of distinguished theoretical physicists. Teller remembers the period wistfully. "The spirit of spontaneity, adventure and surprise of those weeks in Berkeley was never recaptured for me in the many years of hard work in which atomic bombs were developed . . . I am sure that all the participants in those discussions still remember vividly the days when we thought that the atomic bomb could be easily used for a steppingstone toward a thermonuclear explosion which we called a 'super' bomb."
¶ In 1943, Los Alamos was established under the direction of Oppenheimer, to whom Teller gives unstinted credit for pushing A-bomb development "in time to have an influence upon the war." But Oppenheimer, Fermi and others did not lose sight of thermonuclear possibilities.
¶ At this point, Konopinski settled for the theorists a question that still bothers laymen who worry about chain reactions destroying the planet. "He proved that a thermonuclear reaction, even if initiated on the earth, could not spread under any circumstances. It was necessary to prove, and he did prove, that the 'super' bomb could not ignite the atmosphere or the ocean."
¶ After Hiroshima, Los Alamos' spirit was kept alive by its new director, Norris Bradbury.
¶ After the Soviet atomic explosion and the subsequent Washington decision to press for an H-bomb, calculations based on the theories of Teller and others were set up on a machine called ENIAC. But there was fear that this electric brain would be too slow. Stan Ulam, a mathematician, with one helper, "undertook to execute the same job by straightforward hand computation. The next few months saw an amazing competition between the tortoise and the (electronic) hare." Ulam's "results were available even before the lengthy instructions to the machines had been completed . . . In a real emergency the mathematician still wins—if he is really good."