The commands, once written on paper, were then transferred to holes punched in a paper tape and fed into the machine via a teletype machine. That teletype machine, in turn, served to print out results of the computations—in hexadecimal, as I noted earlier: A number might look like 94B7C35AF0.
I wasn’t the only H-bomb theorist using the SEAC that summer of 1952. Marshall Rosenbluth, one of the brightest young physicists at Los Alamos, came for a little while to do runs comparing the solid thermonuclear fuel lithium deuteride and the liquid fuel deuterium.[80] He, assisted on at least one occasion by Dick Garwin, was looking ahead, beyond Mike. As for me, my sole focus that summer was on the upcoming Mike test scheduled for the fall. Only after Mike was “put to bed” did I branch out, considering later assemblies, such as the Castle Bravo shot (with solid fuel) planned for the spring of 1954. But soon after the successful Mike shot, which produced in me that odd combination of euphoria and dread that other nuclear weaponeers have no doubt also experienced, I holed up in my small office in Palmer Lab and got to work on my doctoral dissertation research.
Matterhorn functioned for less than two years. In the project’s final report,{6} prepared in August 1953, Wheeler gives these dates:
• Late December 1950. The project was “conceived” “to help Los Alamos overcome [a] shortage of theoretical manpower.” (This probably means the time when the Los Alamos authorities gave it their blessing; it was conceived in Wheeler’s mind earlier).
• Late February 1951. Los Alamos and Princeton University informally agreed to go forward with the project.
• May 21, 1951. Work began. (This is the official start date. It may have been a week or two later when Wheeler and Toll and I set up shop in the just-acquired metal shack, slept in the Forrestal boiler room, and began recruiting and hiring support staff).
• June 28, 1951. Princeton University and the University of California signed a contract formally establishing the project.
• Early March 1953. The Project was terminated. (Wheeler and a few others put in time thereafter to wrap up the project and prepare its final report.)
I have already commented, in Chapter 11, on the stunning speed with which Matterhorn went from an idea to reality, a speed made possible by fear of the Soviet Union and the related near-hysteria of anticommunism at that time. Equally remarkable is the speed with which Matterhorn, once established, became a significant functioning organization making important contributions to thermonuclear designs. From boiler-room bedroom to full partnership with Los Alamos no more than two or three months elapsed.
Why was Matterhorn able to “hit the ground running”? In part just because of that partnership with Los Alamos. It was as if we were another group in T Division—albeit larger and more independent than the other groups. And in large part because of John Wheeler’s drive and leadership. He was never faint of heart. When he could not induce senior physicists to join the project, he rounded up a group of very bright young physicists and personally inspired their work. When he found that the MANIAC at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study—around the corner, so to speak—was not ready for serious, reliable work, he quickly arranged for us to use an IBM CPC in New York, the SEAC in Washington, and a UNIVAC in Philadelphia. And sprung loose the money to make that possible. Arrangements for the UNIVAC included postponing its delivery to the government agency that had ordered it so it could first serve the higher-priority interests of the Atomic Energy Commission. (According to my memory, it was the Weather Bureau that had to wait, but it may have been the Census Bureau.)
As I mentioned on page 128 only Louis Henyey from Berkeley responded favorably to the invitation to join Matterhorn that Wheeler sent out to a great many senior people in the spring of 1951. (In his 1998 autobiography, Wheeler puts the number of people contacted at 120.{7} In his 1953 final report on Project Matterhorn’s work, he says that he wrote to “all known suitable U.S. theoretical physicists and applied mathematicians—a total of more than 140 people.”{8}) As I recall from the time, very few of those contacted declined because they wanted nothing to do with weapons work. Instead, the reasons included an unwillingness to leave academic work so soon again after the end of World War II; an established position doing defense work elsewhere; and an insufficient proposed salary at Matterhorn.{9}
Among those contacted by Wheeler was, quite naturally, Richard Feynman, his most brilliant former student and his colleague on important work in the 1940s. Wheeler’s letter of March 29, 1951 to Feynman begins: “Dear Dick: I know you plan to spend next year in Brazil. I hope world conditions will permit. They may not.” He continues with the same two-page “full-court press” used in his many other letters. Here is Feynman’s response of April 5 in fulclass="underline"
Dear John:
As you know, I was planning to spend my sabbatical leave in Brazil. I am uncomfortably aware of the very large chance that I will be unable to go. Until that situation becomes definite, however, I do not wish to make any commitment for work next year.
Brazil enabled Feynman to avoid saying whether he would or would not want to join Matterhorn, whether he did or did not approve of Wheeler’s project.
Wheeler’s final Matterhorn report{6} consisted of six parts:
• History of the Project
• Documentation of its work
• Compression
• Burning
• Weapons of the third kind
• Unknown subject
With his characteristic flair, Wheeler arranged the six parts like stories in a daily newspaper, all starting on page 1 and continuing onto various back pages (of which there were 142). The opening “newspaper” spread appears in the illustration on the next page. It shows Wheeler’s imaginative presentation, complete with a quote from Goethe (with one word misspelled), and shows also the result of the redactor’s hand more than sixty years later. On the “inside” pages, only 20 percent of the material survives, and that is largely descriptive material, not technical material. Our Matterhorn work remains secret.
The authorship of PM-B-37 is ascribed to John Wheeler plus four of his young colleagues, including me.[81] To use Niels Bohr’s terminology (see page 28), I feel innocent of the contribution. I must assume that Wheeler incorporated into the report some materials that I had written earlier.
One part of the report (designated “Unknown subject” above) is evidently so sensitive that the title, not just the content, is deleted. About “Weapons of the third kind,” to which nineteen pages of the report are devoted, no clue remains as to what they were, and I cannot provide enlightenment. The reader learns only that, based on work by Pierre Noyes, they are judged to be unfeasible.
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Rosenbluth mimicked Garwin in precocity. He finished high school at 15, earned his Harvard bachelor’s degree at 19, and finished his Chicago Ph.D. at 22.{4} Teller was successful in bringing him to Los Alamos in 1950, where he remained for six years. Like Stan Ulam, he found the mixture of applied and pure research to his liking, and continued that balance at General Atomics before joining academia. His later honors included the National Medal of Science in 1997. He died in 2003.{5}
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The other three are Edward Frieman, who became a professor of astrophysics at Princeton and later director of the Scripps Institute (he died in 2013); John McIntosh, who became a professor of physics at Wesleyan University; and H. Pierre Noyes, later a professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. We were all in our twenties when we worked at Matterhorn.