Sun in a Bottle Read Free Page A

uranium-238 and how to manufacture plutonium-239. 2 However, the big minds roamed at Los Alamos: Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Stanislaw Ulam, John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller.
    Teller, a Hungarian émigré and, arguably, a better theoretician than Oppenheimer, was brought to the University of Chicago in mid-1942 by the Manhattan Project just as it was getting under way. When Teller arrived, nobody assigned him a task, so he set to work trying to design the ultimate weapon, more powerful even than the one the project’s scientists were trying to build. He envisioned a superbomb that used fusion instead of fission. If it worked, it would dwarf an atom bomb just as surely as an atom bomb would dwarf conventional explosives. Teller became obsessed with wielding the power of the sun. It was an obsession that molded him into one of the darkest and most twisted figures of American science. “He’s a danger to all that’s important,” said his fellow physicist Hans Bethe. “I really do feel it would have been a better world without Teller.”
     
     
    Teller was born in Budapest, the child of a successful lawyer. In 1919, when he was eleven years old, the Communist Béla Kun swept to power and declared Hungary a Soviet state. “The communists overturned every aspect of society and the economy,” Teller later wrote. “My father could no longer practice law.” Two soldiers moved into the Tellers’ home, and young Edward came to know hunger. “There was no food (or any other kind of goods) for sale in the stores now owned by the communists. . . . As I recall, cabbage was often all we could find. I still dislike cabbage.”
    After rampant inflation, a coup attempt, a purge, and a military defeat, Kun’s regime ended before the year was out. But the whole experience left Teller with an almost monomaniacal hatred of Communism. In large part, his actions over the next few decades—his attempt to build an arsenal of unlimited power—would be driven by that hatred. 3
    Thus Teller’s vision of a superweapon was possible because there is more than one way to extract energy from the atom. Fission is the easy way. Just get enough fissile material (such as uranium-235 or plutonium- 239) in a small enough space and a chain reaction will start on its own. Heavy atoms will split into fragments, converting mass into energy and creating an enormous explosion. The main problem is getting that fissile material. Neither uranium-235 nor plutonium-239 was easy to obtain, especially with the state of knowledge in 1942 and 1943.
    Fusion is another way to convert mass into energy; it’s the opposite of fission. In fission, heavy atoms split and the sum of the parts is lighter than the original atoms. In fusion, light atoms stick together, and the whole resulting atom is lighter than the sum of the parts that made it. The missing matter—the stuff that disappears when the light atoms combine—becomes energy.
    Fusion is several times more powerful than fission; more of the mass of each reacting atom is converted into energy. Better yet, it is much easier to find the fuel for fusion—light atoms like hydrogen—than it is to find the uranium or plutonium fuel for fission. The oceans are filled with hydrogen’s heavier sibling, deuterium, a great fuel for fusion reactions. It’s not terribly difficult to extract a practically unlimited amount of the stuff.
    Of course, there is a downside. The fusion reaction is extremely difficult to start, and even harder to keep going long enough to produce large quantities of energy. Atoms tend to repel each other, so it is very hard to get them close enough so that they stick together. You need an enormous amount of energy to slam two atoms together forcefully enough to overcome that repulsion and get them to fuse.
    For a fission reaction, you just need to get a lump of uranium big enough. For fusion, you need to manipulate your fuel in some tricky ways. First, you’ve got to