Approaching forty and thinking about what I had accomplished up to that point, I was still very hopeful that much work lay ahead of me. Perhaps because much of what I had worked on or thought about had not yet been put in writing, I felt I still had things in reserve. Given this optimistic nature, I feel this way even now when I am past sixty.
Chapter 11. The "Super"
I was returning to Los Alamos from one of my frequent trips east when our monitoring systems detected the Russian A-bomb explosion. The news had not yet been made public. Immediately upon my arrival several friends — Metropolis, Calkin, and others — who met me at the little airport, greeted me with these items of news: (a) in a poker game the night before, Jack had won eighty dollars (an enormous sum for our kind of stakes), and (b) the Russians had detonated an atomic bomb. I considered this for a moment and said, of course, I believed (a). It was (b) that was true.
Johnny was in Los Alamos and he and Teller had been spending time together discussing this ominous development. I joined them in Johnny's room at the Lodge. The general question was "What now?" At once I said that work should be pushed on the "super." Teller nodded. Needless to say, that was on his mind also. They said they had been discussing how to go about it. The next day Teller left for Washington, perhaps to see Admiral Strauss, who was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, to do what politicking he could there.
Strauss was one of the first AEC Commissioners. He was Jewish. Talking to him I noticed that he had the rather common — and to me pleasant — Jewish tendency to admire successful scientists. He possessed a sort of wistful appreciation of science, perhaps because he was not a scientist himself. In his early days on the Commission he had pushed for the development of a monitoring system to detect the presence of nuclear work anywhere in the world. This could be done by examining air samples from the atmosphere for the presence of certain gases which came from uranium fission. The idea came from Tony Turkevitch, a physical chemist from Chicago. I remember his mentioning such a plan in my presence in Los Alamos during the war.
To what extent Strauss's counsel, influenced by Teller and von Neumann, contributed to President Truman's decision to order full-speed work on the H-bomb, I do not know.
It has to be repeated here again that the work on the "super" had been going on efficiently and systematically. Norris Bradbury was directing the allocation of the theoretical effort. Some six months before this news from Russia, I mentioned to him that I had the impression that some people in Washington did not want this work to continue and Norris had said: "I'll be damned if I'll let anybody in Washington or any politicians tell me what work not to do." I remember his smiling expression when he said it. This sentiment was not what is now called hawkish or motivated by political or military considerations; it referred purely to scientific and technological inquiry.
Theoretical work on the "super" had, as I have shown, continued all along after the "super" conference, but I do not think Teller wanted this publicized very much, for I think he either believed he was or wanted to be known as not only the main but the sole promoter, defender, and organizer of the work. Perhaps he felt that Bradbury, as head of the laboratory, would receive most of the credit for the future thermonuclear bomb, just as Oppenheimer had for the A-bomb, to the exclusion of the other scientists who had done the technical work. Indeed Teller had been and was the original proponent of intensive work on thermonuclear explosions in the United States.
This, of course, is my own interpretation of the reasons for the developments that followed. It may be substantiated in the existing literature, including the notorious Shepley-Blair account published in Life magazine, which contributed so much to the establishment of Teller as the "Father of the H-Bomb." Their subsequent book was later discredited because of the misinformation it contained.
Shortly after President Truman's announcement directing the AEC to proceed with work on the H-Bomb, E. O. Lawrence and Luis Alvarez visited Los Alamos from Berkeley and started discussions with Bradbury and then with Garnow, Teller, and myself about the 'feasibility of constructing a "super." This visit played a part in the politics of this enterprise.
One of Teller's first moves was to enlist a young physicist, Frédéric de Hoffmann, as his assistant. A native of Vienna, Freddy had come to the United States as a young boy before the war. He was young, clever, intelligent, and quick, but not what you might call a really original scientist. He became a sort of factotum, a jack of all trades for communications, contacts with administrators, and other duties. He carried Edward's messages back and forth to Washington and also did some technical work. He was an ideal associate for Edward, who later could afford to be generous with credit for Freddy's contributions, which would not detract from his own appearance as the almost exclusive originator, propagator, and executor of the project.
A first committee was formed to organize all work on the "super" and investigate all possible schemes for constructing it. The committee's work was directed by Teller, as chairman, Gamow, and myself.
Several different proposals of ideas existed on how to initiate the thermonuclear reaction, using fission bombs as starter. One of Gamow's was called "the cat's tail." Another was Edward's original proposal. Gamow drew a humorous cartoon with symbolic representations of these various schemes. In it he squeezes a cat by the tail, I spit in a spittoon, and Teller wears an Indian fertility necklace, which according to Gamow is the symbol for the womb, a word he pronounced "vombb." This cartoon has appeared among the illustrations in his autobiography, My World Line, published by The Viking Press in 1970.
Both Gamow and I showed a lot of independence of thought in our meetings, and Teller did not like this very much. Not too surprisingly, the original "super" directing committee soon ceased to exist. At a moment when both Gamow and I were out of town, Teller prevailed upon Bradbury to disband the committee and to replace it by another organizational entity. Gamow was quite put out by this. I did not care, but I wrote him, prophetically it seems, that great troubles would follow because of Edward's obstinacy, his single-mindedness, and his overwhelming ambition. This letter, like all communications about work in Los Alamos, was "classified." I expect it is still filed somewhere and perhaps some day may be included in some collection of documents from that period. Another such "indiscreet" letter is one I wrote to von Neumann in which I made fun of Edward's attitude. This letter happens to be quoted in the second volume of the official history of the AEC, The Atomic Shield. In it I mention that an idea occurred to me which I had communicated to Edward. I added in jest that since Edward liked it very much perhaps that meant it would not work either.
At some time I outlined a possible detailed calculation which became the base of the work carried out by von Neumann on the newly built electronic computing machines with the help of Klari, as a programmer, and Cerda and Foster Evans, a husband-and-wife team of physicists who had joined the project after the war.
The wartime, or rather, immediate postwar Metropolis-Frankel calculation was very schematic compared to what I had in mind. More ambitious calculations of this sort had become possible since computers had improved both in speed and in the size of their memories. The steps outlined involved a fantastic number of' arithmetical operations. Johnny said to me one day, "This computation will require more multiplications than have ever been done before by all of humanity." But when I estimated roughly the number of multiplications performed by all the world's school children in the last fifty years, I found that this number was larger by about a factor of ten!