Part 1

THE HELL BOMB

BY

_William L. Laurence_

[Illustration: [Logo]]

1951 NEW YORK

ALFRED A. KNOPF

[Illustration: THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK, PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.]

_Copyright 1950 by The Curtis Publishing Co. Copyright 1950 by William L. Laurence. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manufactured in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Limited._

FIRST AND SECOND PRINTINGS BEFORE PUBLICATION THIRD PRINTING, JANUARY 1951

To _FLORENCE_

FOREWORD

The material in this book falls into two categories: (1) a popular version in terms understandable to the layman of technical data published in scientific literature in this country and abroad, and widely known among scientists everywhere; and (2) technical conclusions reached by deduction based on these published facts and theory, for which I assume the sole responsibility. In doing so, I wish to make it emphatically clear that I have had no access to any classified information on the current hydrogen-bomb program, and also that whatever access I had to H-bomb information during my stay at Los Alamos in the spring and summer of 1945 was strictly limited to the somewhat vague and general discussions carried on there in 1945 and earlier.

I hereby take the opportunity to express my profound appreciation to Dr. James G. Beckerley, Director of Classification, Atomic Energy Commission, Washington, D. C., and to Mr. Corbin Allardice, Director, Public Information Service, of the AEC’s New York Operations Office, for their generous cooperation in clearing this manuscript for publication. It must be strictly understood that any such clearance merely means that the AEC has “no objection to publication” on the grounds of security. It does not in any way vouch for the accuracy or correctness of the book’s contents.

WILLIAM L. LAURENCE

_New York City July 30, 1950_

CONTENTS

I The Truth about the Hydrogen Bomb 3

II The Real Secret of the Hydrogen Bomb 29

III Shall We Renounce the Use of the H-bomb? 57

IV Korea Cleared the Air 88

V A Primer of Atomic Energy 114

APPENDIX: The Hydrogen Bomb and International Control 149 A. _Significant Events in the History of International Control of Atomic Weapons_ 151 B. _The International Control of Atomic Weapons: a Brief History of Proposals and Negotiations_ 155 C. _The Atomic Impasse_ 168 D. _Possible Questions Regarding H-bombs and International Control_ 171

INTRODUCTION

“Democracy Depends on an Informed Electorate”

“_It is most important in our democracy that our government be frank and open with the citizens. In a democracy it is only possible to have good government when the citizens are well informed. It is difficult enough for them to become well informed when the information is easily available. When that information is not available, it is impossible. While there may be some cases in which the information which the citizen needs, in order to make an intelligent judgment of national policy, must be kept secret, so that military potential will not be jeopardized, the present use of secrecy far exceeds this minimum limit. These are the methods of an authoritarian government and should be vigorously opposed in our democracy...._

“_The citizen must choose insofar as that is possible. Today, if he tries to come to some conclusion about what should be done to increase the national security, the citizen runs up against a high wall of secrecy. He can, of course, take the easy solution and say that these are questions which should be left to the upper echelons of the military establishment to decide. But these questions are so important today, that to leave them to the military men to decide is for the citizen essentially to abrogate his basic responsibility. If, in time of peace, questions on which the future of our country depends are left to any small group, not representative of the people, to decide, we have gone a long way toward authoritarian government._

“_The United States has grown to be a strong nation under a constitution which wisely has laid great emphasis upon the importance of free and open discussion. Urged by a large number of people who have fallen for the fallacy that in secrecy there is security, and, I regret, encouraged by many, including eminent scientists, to prophesy doom just around the corner, we are dangerously close to abandoning those principles of free speech and open discussion which have made our country great. The democratic system depends on making intelligent decisions by the electorate. Our democratic heritage can only be carried on if the citizen has the information with which to make an intelligent decision._”

(From a talk on the hydrogen bomb, March 27, 1950, at Town Hall, Los Angeles, by PROFESSOR ROBERT F. BACHER, head of the Physics Department, California Institute of Technology. Professor Bacher served as the first scientific member of the Atomic Energy Commission and was one of the major architects of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico.)

THE HELL BOMB

I THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HYDROGEN BOMB

I first heard about the hydrogen bomb in the spring of 1945 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where our scientists were putting the finishing touches on the model-T uranium, or plutonium, fission bomb. I learned to my astonishment that, in addition to this work, they were already considering preliminary designs for a hydrogen-fusion bomb, which in their lighter moments they called the “Superduper” or just the “Super.”

I can still remember my shock and incredulity when I first heard about it from one of the scientists assigned to me by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer as guides in the Dantesque world that was Los Alamos, where the very atmosphere gave one the sense of being in the presence of the supernatural. It seemed so fantastic to talk of a superatomic bomb even before the uranium, or the plutonium, bomb had been completed and tested—in fact, even before anybody knew that it would work at all—that I was inclined at first to disbelieve it. Could anything be more powerful, I found myself thinking, than a weapon that, on paper at least, promised to release an explosive force of 20,000 tons of TNT? It was a screwball world, this world of Los Alamos, I kept saying to myself, and this was just a screwball notion of my younger scientific mentors.

So at the first opportunity I put the question to Professor Hans A. Bethe, of Cornell University, one of the world’s top atomic scientists, who headed the elite circle of theoretical physicists at Los Alamos. Dr. Bethe, I knew, was the outstanding authority in the world qualified to talk about the subject, since he was the very man who first succeeded in explaining how the fusion of hydrogen in the sun is the source of energy that will make it possible for life to continue on earth for billions of years.

“Is it true about the superbomb?” I asked him. “Will it really be as much as fifty times as powerful as the uranium or plutonium bomb?”

I shall never forget the impact on me of his quiet answer as he looked away toward the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountain range, their peaks turning blood-red in the New Mexico twilight. “Yes,” he said, “it could be made to equal a million tons of TNT.” Then, after a pause: “Even more than a million.”

The tops of the mountains seemed to catch fire as he spoke.

Long before it was discovered that vast amounts of energy could be liberated by the fission (splitting) of the nuclei of a twin of the heaviest element in nature—namely, uranium of atomic mass 235 (235 times the mass of the hydrogen atom, lightest of all the elements)—scientists had known that truly staggering amounts of energy would be released if one could fuse together four atoms of hydrogen, the first element on the atomic table, into one atom of helium, element number two on that table, which weighs about four times as much as hydrogen. In December 1938—three weeks before the discovery of uranium fission was announced in Germany—Dr. Bethe had published his famous hypothesis about the fusion of four hydrogen atoms in the sun to form helium. This provided the first satisfactory explanation of the mechanism that enables the sun to radiate away in space every second a quantity of light and heat equivalent to the energy content of nearly fifteen quadrillion tons of coal. And while Dr. Bethe was the first to work out the fine details of the process, scientists had been speculating for more than twenty years on the likelihood of hydrogen fusion in the sun as source of the sun’s eternal radiance.

American audiences first heard about hydrogen as the solar fuel in a lecture, on March 10, 1922, at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, by Professor Francis William Aston, famous British Nobel-Prize-winning chemist, who even at that early date warned mankind against what he called “tinkering with the angry atoms.” His words on that occasion have a strange prophetic ring, though most of what he said is now known to be wrong. “Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this energy [from hydrogen] in a form which could be employed,” he predicted, “the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction, but the remote possibility must always be considered that the energy, once liberated, will be completely uncontrollable and by its violence detonate a neighboring substance. If this happens, all of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed [into helium] at once, and this most successful experiment might be published to the rest of the universe in the form of a new star of extraordinary brilliance, as the earth blew up in one vast explosion.”

By 1945 we had learned that many things were wrong in Professor Aston’s prophecy. It had been definitely established, for example, that it would be impossible to “transform all the hydrogen on earth at once,” no matter how many superduper hydrogen bombs were to be exploded. In fact, we had learned that, under conditions as they exist on earth, we could never use common hydrogen, the element that makes up one ninth by weight of all water, either in a superduper bomb or as an atomic fuel for power. On the other hand, ten years after Dr. Aston’s lecture a new type of hydrogen was discovered to exist in nature. It was found to constitute one five-thousandth part of the earth’s waters, including the water in the tissues of plants and animals. It was shown to have an atomic weight of two—double the weight of common hydrogen—and was named deuterium. The nucleus, or center, of the deuterium atom was named the deuteron, to distinguish it from the nucleus of common hydrogen, known as the proton. Deuterium also became popularly known as “heavy hydrogen.” Water containing two deuterium atoms in place of the two atoms of light hydrogen became known as “heavy water.”

The most startling fact learned about deuterium soon after its discovery in 1932 was that it offered potentialities as an atomic fuel, or an explosive, of tremendous energy, provided one condition could be met. This condition was a “match” to light it with. And here was the catch. The flame of this match, it was found, would have to have a temperature of the order of 50,000,000 degrees centigrade, two and a half times the temperature in the interior of the sun.

Oddly enough, the discovery of the principle that made the atomic bomb possible also brought with it the promise that a “deuterium fire” might, after all, be lighted on earth. Early studies had revealed that the explosion of an atomic bomb, if it lived up to expectations, would generate a central temperature of about 50,000,000 degrees centigrade. Here, at last, was the promise of realization of the impossible—the 50,000,000 degree match.

The men of Los Alamos thus knew that if the atomic bomb they were just completing for its first test worked as they hoped it would, it could be used as the match to light the deuterium fire. They could build a superduper bomb of a thousand times the power of the atomic bomb by incorporating deuterium in the A-bomb, the explosion of which would act as the trigger for the superexplosion. And they also knew that the deuterium bomb held such additional potentialities of terror, beyond its vastly greater blasting and burning power, that the step from the duper to the super would be just as great as the step from TNT to the duper.

The hydrogen bomb, H-bomb, or hell bomb, as the fusion bomb had become popularly known, thus became a reality in the flash of the explosion of the first atomic bomb at 5:30 of the morning of July 16, 1945, on the New Mexico desert. As the men of Los Alamos, of whom I was at that time a privileged member, watched the supramundane light and the apocalyptic mushroom-topped mountain of nuclear fire rising to a height of more than eight miles through the clouds, they did not have to wait until they checked with their measuring instruments to know that a match sparking a flame of about 50,000,000 degrees centigrade had been lighted on earth for the first time. The size of the fire mountain and the end-of-the-world-like thunder that reverberated all around, told the tale better than any puny man-made instruments.

And there in our midst, as we learned only recently, stood a Judas, Klaus Fuchs, a name that “will live in infamy” along with that of other archtraitors of history. By the greatest of ironies, there he was, this spy, standing right in the center of what we believed at the time to be the world’s greatest secret, waiting at that very moment to tell the Russians of our success and how we achieved it. As he confessed five years later, he betrayed to them the most intimate details not only about the A-bomb but about the H-bomb as well—details that he learned as a member of the innermost of inner circles. For, alas, he was a trusted member of the theoretical division, the sanctum sanctorum of Los Alamos. This select group of scientists, behind doubly and triply locked doors, discussed in whispers their ideas about the superduper.

His associates at Los Alamos, who should know, sadly admit that Fuchs made it possible for Russia to develop her A-bomb at least a year ahead of time. It is my own conviction that the information he gave the Russians made it possible for their scientists to attain their goal at least three, and possibly as much as ten, years sooner than they could have done it on their own. Yet, though Fuchs confessed everything he told the Russians, the content of his confession is still kept a top secret from the American people, who sadly need information on one of the greatest problems facing mankind. The reason given is that we cannot actually be sure that Fuchs told the Russians all that he says he did, and, if published, his confession might, by his tricky design, give the Russians additional information. Of course, anything is possible for a warped mind such as that of Fuchs. Nevertheless, it seems highly implausible that this traitor, who went to the Russians voluntarily, should withhold any vital information from them for as long as five years. The best evidence that he didn’t is the Russian A-bomb.

Yet some good comes even of the greatest evil. All the circumstantial evidence points to the fact that during the five-year period following the end of the war our work on the hydrogen bomb had stopped completely. The A-bomb was the mightiest weapon in the world, we seem to have reasoned, and it would take Russia many years before she would get an A-bomb of her own. Why spend great efforts on a superbomb?

The shock when Russia exploded her first A-bomb much sooner than we expected, topped by the second shock that Fuchs had handed Moscow all our major secrets on a platter—including, as must be surmised, those of the H-bomb—awakened us to the facts of life. It is no accident that President Truman’s official announcement of the order to build “the so-called hydrogen bomb or superbomb” came within three days of the announcement of Fuchs’s arrest and confession. The President gave his order with full knowledge of Fuchs’s confession, which made it evident that the Russians were already at work on the hydrogen bomb and had probably been working on it uninterruptedly since 1945. The tragic prospect is that instead of the Russians catching up with us, it is we who may have to catch up with them.

Five years after the first announcement of the explosion of the A-bomb over Hiroshima, even the most intelligent Americans still have only the vaguest idea about the facts. Yet these facts are within the understanding of the average man. If we keep the earlier analogy of the match in mind, it becomes simple to understand the principles underlying both the A-bomb, now more correctly identified as the “fission bomb,” and the hydrogen bomb, more properly described as the “fusion bomb.”

Our principal fuel is coal, which, as everyone knows, is “bottled sunshine,” stored up in plants that grew about two hundred million years ago. When we apply the small amount of heat energy from a match, the bottled energy is released in the form of light and heat, which we can use in a great variety of ways. The point here is that it requires only the application of a very small amount of energy from a match to release a very large amount of energy that has been stored for millions of years in the ancient plants we know as coal.

Now, during the past half century we discovered that the nuclei, or centers, of the smallest units of which the ninety-odd elements of the material universe are made up—units we know as atoms—had stored up within them since the beginning of creation amounts of energy millions of times greater than is stored up by the sun in coal. But we had no match with which to start an atomic fire burning.

Then, in January 1939, came the world-shaking discovery of the phenomenon known as uranium fission. In simple language, we had found a proper “match” for lighting a fire with a twin of uranium, the ninety-second, and last, natural element. This twin is a rare form of uranium known as uranium 235—the figure signifying that it is 235 times heavier than common hydrogen. Doubly phenomenal, the discovery of uranium fission meant that to light the atomic fire, with the release of stored-up energy three million times greater than that of coal and twenty million times that of TNT (on an equal-weight basis) would require no match at all. When proper conditions are met, the atomic fire would be lighted automatically by spontaneous combustion.

What are these proper conditions? In the presence of certain chemical agencies, spontaneous combustion will take place when an easily burning substance, such as sawdust, for example, accumulates heat until it reaches the kindling temperature at which it ignites. The chemical agencies here are the equivalent of a match.

The requirement to start the spontaneous combustion of uranium 235, and also of two man-made elements named plutonium and uranium 233 (all three known as fissionable materials or nuclear fuels), is just as simple. In this operation you do not need a critical temperature, but what is known as a critical mass. This simply means that spontaneous combustion of any one of the three atomic fuels takes place as soon as you assemble a lump of a certain weight. The actual critical mass is a top secret. But the noted British physicist, Dr. M. L. E. Oliphant, of radar fame, published in 1946 his own estimate, which places its weight between ten and thirty kilograms. If so, this would mean that a lump of uranium 235 (U-235), plutonium, or U-233, weighing ten or thirty kilograms, as the case may be, would explode automatically by spontaneous combustion and release an explosive force of 20,000 tons of TNT for each kilogram undergoing complete combustion. In the conventional A-bomb a critical mass is assembled in the last split second by a timing mechanism that brings together, let us say, one tenth and nine tenths of a critical mass. The spontaneous combustion that followed such a consummation on August 6 and 9, 1945 destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Thus, if we substitute the familiar phrase “spontaneous combustion” for the less familiar word “fission,” we get a clear understanding of what is known in scientific jargon as the “fission process,” a “self-multiplying chain reaction with neutrons,” and similar technical mumbo-jumbo. These terms simply mean the lighting of an atomic fire and the release of great amounts of the energy stored in the nuclei of U-235 since the beginning of the universe. The two so-called man-made elements are not really created. They are merely transformed out of two natural heavy elements in such a way that their stored energy is liberated by the process of spontaneous combustion.

Why, one may ask, does not spontaneous combustion of U-235 take place in nature? Why, indeed, has not all the U-235 in nature caught fire automatically long ago? To this also there is a simple answer. Just as in the spontaneous combustion of sawdust the material must be dry enough to burn, so must the U-235. Only in place of the word “dry” we must use the word “concentrated.” The U-235 found in nature is very much diluted with another element that makes it “wet.” It therefore must be separated first, by a very laborious and costly process, from the nonfissionable, or “wetting,” element. Even then it won’t catch fire, and could not be made to burn by any means, until the amount separated (“dried”) reaches the critical mass. When these two conditions—conditions that do not exist in nature—are met, the U-235 catches fire just as sawdust does when it reaches the critical temperature.

The fact that as soon as a critical mass is assembled the three elemental atomic fuels burst into flame automatically thus puts a definite limit to the amount of material that can be used in the conventional A-bomb. The best you can do is to incorporate into a bomb two fragments, let us say, of nine tenths of a critical mass each. To enclose more than two such fragments would present difficulties that appear impossible to overcome. It is this limitation of size, an insurmountable roadblock put there by mother nature, that makes the basic difference between the A-bomb and the H-bomb.

For, as we have already seen, to light an atomic fire with deuterium it is necessary to strike a match generating a flame with a temperature of about 50,000,000 degrees centigrade. As long as no such match is applied, no fire can start. It thus becomes obvious that deuterium is not limited by nature to a critical mass. A quantity of deuterium a thousand times the amount of the U-235, and hence a thousand times more powerful, can therefore be incorporated in an ordinary A-bomb, where it would remain quiescent until the A-bomb match is struck. Weight for weight, deuterium has only a little more energy content than U-235, so that a bomb incorporating a 1,000 kilograms (one ton) of deuterium would thus have an energy of 20,000,000 tons of TNT.