#Edward Teller | Stanislaw Ulam

[xtruss]

Why Robert Oppenheimer's Atomic Bomb Still Haunts Us

— By Richard Rhodes | Published May 15, 2013

Oppenheimer spearheaded the creation of the atom bomb. René Burri/Magnum

Robert Oppenheimer oversaw the design and construction of the first atomic bombs. The American theoretical physicist wasn't the only one involved—more than 130,000 people contributed their skills to the World War II Manhattan Project, from construction workers to explosives experts to Soviet spies—but his name survives uniquely in popular memory as the names of the other participants fade. British philosopher Ray Monk's lengthy new biography of the man is only the most recent of several to appear, and Oppenheimer wins significant assessment in every history of the Manhattan Project, including my own. Why this one man should have come to stand for the whole huge business, then, is the essential question any biographer must answer.

It's not as if the bomb program were bereft of men of distinction. Gen. Leslie Groves built the Pentagon and thousands of other U.S. military installations before leading the entire Manhattan Project to success in record time. Hans Bethe discovered the sequence of thermonuclear reactions that fire the stars. Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi invented the nuclear reactor. John von Neumann conceived the stored-program digital computer. Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam co-invented the hydrogen bomb. Luis Alvarez devised a whole new technology for detonating explosives to make the Fat Man bomb work, and later, with his son, Walter, proved that an Earth-impacting asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. The list goes on. What was so special about Oppenheimer?

He was brilliant, rich, handsome, charismatic. Women adored him. As a young professor at Berkeley and Caltech in the 1930s, he broke the European monopoly on theoretical physics, contributing significantly to making America a physics powerhouse that continues to win a freight of Nobel Prizes. Despite never having directed any organization before, he led the Los Alamos bomb laboratory with such skill that even his worst enemy, Edward Teller, told me once that Oppenheimer was the best lab director he'd ever known. After the war he led the group of scientists who guided American nuclear policy, the General Advisory Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). He finished out his life as director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he welcomed young scientists and scholars into that traditionally aloof club.

August 9, 1945: Nagasaki is hit by an atom bomb. Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum/EPA

Those were exceptional achievements, but they don't by themselves explain his unique place in nuclear history. For that, add in the dark side. His brilliance came with a casual cruelty, born certainly of insecurity, which lashed out with invective against anyone who said anything he considered stupid; even the brilliant Bethe wasn't exempt. His relationships with the significant women in his life were destructive: his first deep love, Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a Berkeley professor, was a suicide; his wife, Kitty, a lifelong alcoholic. His daughter committed suicide; his son continues to live an isolated life.

His Choices or Mistakes, Combined with his Penchant for Humiliating Lesser Men, Eventually Destroyed Him.

Oppenheimer's achievements as a theoretical physicist never reached the level his brilliance seemed to promise; the reason, his student and later Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger judged, was that he "very much insisted on displaying that he was on top of everything"—a polite way of saying Oppenheimer was glib. The physicist Isidor Rabi, a Nobel laureate colleague whom Oppenheimer deeply respected, thought he attributed too much mystery to the workings of nature. Monk notes his curiously uncritical respect for the received wisdom of his field.

Monk's discussion of Oppenheimer's work in physics is one of his book's great contributions to the saga, an area of the man's life that previous biographies have neglected. In the late 1920s Oppenheimer first worked out the physics of what came to be called black holes, those collapsing giant stars that pull even light in behind them as they shrink to solar-system or even planetary size. Some have speculated Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel for that work had he lived to see the first black hole identified in 1971.

Oppenheimer with Albert Einstein, circa the 1940s. Corbis

Oppenheimer's patriotism should have been evident to even the most obtuse government critic. He gave up his beloved physics, after all, not to mention any vestige of personal privacy, to help make his country invulnerable with atomic bombs. Yet he risked his work and reputation by dabbling in left-wing and communist politics before the war and lying to security officers during the war about a solicitation to espionage he received. His choices or mistakes, combined with his penchant for humiliating lesser men, eventually destroyed him.

One of those lesser men, a vicious piece of work named Lewis Strauss, a former shoe salesman turned Wall Street financier and physicist manqué, was the vehicle of Oppenheimer's destruction. When President Eisenhower appointed Strauss to the chairmanship of the AEC in the summer of 1953, Strauss pieced together a case against Oppenheimer. He was still splenetic from an extended Oppenheimer drubbing delivered during a congressional hearing all the way back in 1948, and he believed the physicist was a Soviet spy.

Strauss proceeded to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance, effectively shutting him out of government. Oppenheimer could have accepted his fate and returned to an academic life filled with honors; he was due to be dropped as an AEC consultant anyway. He chose instead to fight the charges. Strauss found a brutal prosecuting attorney to question the scientist, bugged his communications with his attorney, and stalled giving the attorney the clearances he needed to vet the charges. The transcript of the hearing In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the great, dark documents of the early atomic age, almost Shakespearean in its craven parade of hostile witnesses through the government star chamber, with the victim himself, catatonic with shame, sunken on a couch incessantly smoking the cigarettes that would kill him with throat cancer at 63 in 1967.

Rabi was one of the few witnesses who stood up for his friend, finally challenging the hearing board in exasperation, "We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it [because of Oppenheimer's work], and what more do you want, mermaids?" What Strauss and others, particularly Edward Teller, wanted was Oppenheimer's head on a platter, and they got it. The public humiliation, which he called "my train wreck," destroyed him. Those who knew him best have told me sadly that he was never the same again.

For Monk as for Rabi, Oppenheimer's central problem was his hollow core, his false sense of self, which Rabi with characteristic wit framed as an inability to decide whether he wanted to be president of the Knights of Columbus or B'nai B'rith. The German Jews who were Oppenheimer's 19th-century forebears had worked hard at assimilation—that is, at denying their religious heritage. Oppenheimer's parents submerged that heritage further in New York's ethical-culture movement that salvaged the humanism of Judaism while scrapping the supernatural overburden. Oppenheimer, actor that he was, could fit himself to almost any role, but turned either abject or imperious when threatened. He was a great lab director at Los Alamos because of his intelligence—"He was much smarter than the rest of us," Bethe told me—because of his broad knowledge and culture; because of his psychological insight into the complicated personalities of the gifted men assembled there to work on the bomb; most of all because he decided to play that role, as a patriotic citizen, and played it superbly.

Monk is a levelheaded and congenial guide to Oppenheimer's life, his biography certainly the best that has yet come along. But he devotes far too many pages to Oppenheimer's Depression-era flirtation with communism, a dead letter long ago and one that speaks more of a rich esthete's awakening to the suffering in the world than to Oppenheimer's political convictions. He doesn't always get the science right. Most of the errors are trivial, but a few are important to the story.

Their Fundamental Objection Was to Giving up Production of Real Weapons so That Teller Could Pursue His Pipe Dream, a Dead-end Hydrogen Bomb Design.

A fundamental reason Oppenheimer opposed a crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb in response to the first Soviet atomic-bomb test in 1949 was the requirement of Edward Teller's "Super" design for large amounts of a rare isotope of hydrogen, tritium. Tritium is bred by irradiating lithium in a nuclear reactor, but the slugs of lithium take up space that would otherwise be devoted to breeding plutonium. To make tritium for a hydrogen bomb that the U.S. did not know how to build would have required sacrificing most of the U.S. production of plutonium for devastating atomic bombs the U.S. did know how to build. To Oppenheimer and the other scientists on the GAC, such an irresponsible substitution as an answer to the Soviet bomb made no strategic sense. It's true that the hydrogen bomb with its potentially unlimited scale of destruction made no military sense to them either—and was morally repugnant to some of them as well. But their fundamental objection, which Monk overlooks, was to giving up production of real weapons so that Teller could pursue his pipe dream, a dead-end hydrogen bomb design that never worked.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967)

More egregious is Monk's notion that the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer's mentor during the war on the international implications of the new technology, pushed for the bomb's use on Japan to make its terror manifest. He did not. He pushed, to the contrary, for the Allies, the Soviet Union included, to discuss the implications of the bomb prior to its use and to devise a framework for controlling it. Bohr foresaw that the bomb would stalemate major war, as it has, but correctly feared that U.S. secrecy about its development would lead to a U.S.-Soviet arms race. He conferred with both Roosevelt and Churchill about presenting the fact of the bomb to the Russians as a common danger to the world, like a new epidemic disease, that needed to be quarantined by common agreement. Churchill vehemently disagreed, and Roosevelt was old and ill. The moment passed. The arms race followed, as Bohr foresaw, and with diminished force, among pariah states like Iran and North Korea, continues to this day.

Monk's Oppenheimer is a less appealing figure than the Oppenheimer of previous biographies, perhaps because, as an Englishman, Monk is less susceptible to Oppenheimer's rhetorical gifts and more candid about calling out his evasions. He pulls together most of what several generations of Oppenheimer scholars have found and offers new revelations as well. Yet there's a faint whiff of condescension in his portrait, and the real Oppenheimer, the man whom so many loved and admired, still somehow escapes him. He misses the deep alignment of Robert Oppenheimer's life with Greek tragedy, the charismatic hubris that was his glory but also the flaw that brought him low. But maybe I'm expecting too much: maybe only a large work of fiction could assemble that critical mass.

[denimbex1986]

If you have not watched Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus yet, there is still time to see it in theaters. A 100-day cinema run is a rarity these days, and the fact Nolan was able to secure it attests to his clout in Hollywood. But brilliant as it is, the film is not without faults, although most will go unnoticed by regular viewing audiences and only miff the worst of nitpickers. But Poles are particularly peeved whenever our contribution to great historical events is erased from the narrative for the sake of pacing.

To set the record straight right from the get-go, this is not intended as a criticism of Nolan’s film. But it is vexing to see the Polish contribution treated like something most easily disposed of when the story needs to be simplified. Even in the old days, when films such as 1969's “The Battle of Britain” and 1977's “A Bridge Too Far” were made, Poles got slightly more respect than Rodney Dangerfield.

Nowadays, we see films such as the 2014 film “The Imitation Game,” which tells the story of Alan Turing and his Bletchley Park team of codebreakers working on cracking the Enigma code. As Dr. Grażyna Żebrowska, an adviser at the Polish embassy in D.C., said of the film, “there was an audible sigh in Polish cinemas when [its] contribution was reduced to just one line.”

But Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski, who broke the code back in 1932 and whose work later allowed Turing to crack successive, more sophisticated versions of the Enigma, were absent from the film, and, after all, it is a film about Turing, not about them. Perhaps they deserve their own film?

Similarly, “Oppenheimer” is a story about none other than Robert Oppenheimer. But with so many characters, many of whom the audience will probably struggle to even remember the names of (those strange foreign names, like Teller, Szilard, Fermi, Bethe, Bohr, Lomanitz, Alvarez, Rabi, and a certain inconspicuous old man named Einstein), it just seems almost deliberate that not once is Stanisław Ulam even mentioned.

There is no point in wallowing in self-pity. If Nolan did not think Ulam was an interesting enough character to include in his picture, let him have his way. In the meantime, here is the story of Stanisław Ulam, who, like Rejewski, Różycki, and Zygalski, probably deserves his own film.

Stanisław Ulam was born on April 13, 1909, in Lviv, modern-day Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and known by the Polish name Lwów, or Lemberg in German.

He was the son of Józef and Anna. His father was a lawyer, and the well-off Ulams were assimilated into Polish culture, which is attested to by the fact that Stanisław received a typically Polish name associated with two Polish Roman Catholic saints.

The outbreak of World War I forced the family to leave the city, which fell to the Russians before being retaken by the Central Powers later in the war. His father being a staff officer of the reserve mobilized for the war effort, the family moved around the Habsburg empire during wartime, initially to Vienna and then to Moravská Ostrava in what is now the Czech Republic. It was during that time that Stanisław learned German. But young Ulam did not only have a knack for languages. His mind was definitely mathematically oriented.

Even at a young age, he displayed a genius for numbers and would independently come up with solutions to mathematical problems he encountered before learning about how to solve them later in school. His father initially wanted Stanisław to study law and take over the family business but recognized that his son’s talents lay elsewhere, and ultimately Stanisław Ulam went on to study engineering at the Lviv Polytechnic in 1927.

But it seems that engineering was a bit too practical for him. He would spend more time attending courses in math taught by such great minds as Stefan Banach than engineering classes. Ultimately, he decided to pose himself a challenge: should he successfully solve a yet unsolved mathematical problem, he would abandon engineering in favor of studying mathematics.

After all that we have learned about him, will it be a surprise to anyone that Stanisław Ulam ultimately received his doctorate’s degree in mathematics at just 24?

Lviv was a major hub of what is now called the Polish School of Mathematics, which achieved many breakthroughs in the field during the interwar period. It was a great place for forward-thinking mathematicians, but Ulam thought it unlikely that he would be able to attain a professorship in his home country. Mathematics being a universal language, he therefore went on to lecture abroad, initially in Western Europe and then in the U.S.

Ulam lectured at Princeton and then at Harvard. In the summer of 1939, he briefly returned to Poland to collect his younger brother, Adam, who got into Brown University and went on to become a prominent scholar (philosopher, historian, political scientist, Sovietologist, and Harvard professor) in his own right.

While on their way across the Atlantic, the brothers learned of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact via the wireless and of the German invasion once they arrived in the U.S. Stanisław and Adam would be the only members of their immediate family to survive the war, while the rest perished in the Holocaust.

In 1940, Stanisław Ulam got the post of professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he also met his wife, Françoise Aron, a French student of English literature. Next year, he was also granted U.S. citizenship. With his country of birth under brutal occupation and with the U.S. bracing itself for the inevitability of joining the conflict, Ulam felt a need to contribute to the war effort, but he was turned back by the military on account of his poor eyesight (this was also the case with his brother). But he continued to seek an opportunity to work for the army, and in 1943 he was recommended for the Manhattan Project.

The recommendation came for Hans Bethe, whom you could see in Nolan’s film portrayed by Gustaf Skarsgård (yes, of the Skarsgårds).

To put it in brief, Ulam’s job at Los Alamos entailed him doing the thing he was best at, which was coming up with novel and innovative solutions on how to calculate things that were not even theorized about before. The physicists came up with the theory, and when they stumbled upon a problem, they tasked Ulam with doing the calculations.

As the project was nearing completion, some of the scientists at Los Alamos, including Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and Stanisław Ulam, were delegated to a branching out “Super” bomb project, which would eventually evolve into the hydrogen bomb. In essence, a hydrogen bomb uses a nuclear bomb (which operates on the principle of splitting atoms, known as nuclear fission) as a charge to launch the process of nuclear fusion, during which atoms of hydrogen are rammed together with enough power to fuse into atoms of heavier elements. To realize how powerful a reaction that is, you have to do nothing more than look up at the Sun.

In 1945, Ulam was struck by a bout of acute encephalitis but managed to recover following emergency surgery, although he did briefly lose the ability to speak, and he feared that the illness could have adversely influenced his mental faculties. Reportedly, after waking up from the post-surgery coma, he was unable to answer the doctor’s question as to what is the product of adding 13 and 8, but upon being asked what is the root of 20, he answered that it was about 4.4. Ulam’s illness had also caused a brief panic at Los Alamos, one reason being the fear that in his fragile state he might spill some secrets and the other being the supposition that his condition may have been caused by radiation, although this turned out not to be the case.

In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear bomb. Its development was facilitated by several scientists working for the Manhattan Project who were either spies motivated by communist ideas or were morally apprehensive about the imbalance of power caused by only one country being in possession of such a powerful weapon.

Yes, because what could possibly be wrong with the proposition that a balance must be maintained between democracies and genocidal dictatorships by giving the latter access to weapons of mass destruction?

This galvanized the U.S. effort to develop an even more powerful “super” bomb, the hydrogen (or thermonuclear) bomb mentioned earlier. Edward Teller headed the project, but the work appeared to be going nowhere as there was no immediately apparent method to exert enough force on hydrogen atoms to start the fusion reaction. Ever the innovator, Ulam suggested some tweaks to the design, which inspired Teller to change it even further and eventually come up with what eventually became the Teller-Ulam design (or configuration), which the two presented in a classified paper in early 1951. The first thermonuclear bomb was successfully tested the next year.

It is odd that anyone would want to compete for the dubious honor of inventing a weapon with a destructive force thousands of times stronger than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the only one who appeared to want the honor purely for himself appeared to be Teller, who went so far as to say that Ulam himself never believed in the design and merely signed the paper upon Teller’s request, thinking that otherwise no one would believe in its feasibility.

It is impossible to know the definite truth, as the documentation remains classified even seven decades later, but other people involved in developing the H-bomb credited both Teller and Ulam to a greater or lesser extent equally, and perhaps Hans Bethe put it in the wittiest manner:

“After the H-bomb was made, reporters started to call Teller the father of the H-bomb. For the sake of history, I think it is more precise to say that Ulam is the father, because he provided the seed, and Teller is the mother because he remained with the child. As for me, I guess I am the midwife.”

As for Ulam himself, he claimed in his autobiography titled “Adventures of a Mathematician”, that he believed the development of a weapon so powerful would make the war an impossibility, except if someone made a mistake.

As we know with the power of hindsight, Ulam was a brilliant mathematician but not much of a prophet. Fortunately, thermonuclear weapons have never yet been used in conflict.

And this is the story of Stanisław Ulam up to the point of the development of the hydrogen bomb. Afterward, he returned to academia and lectured at various U.S. universities. In the aftermath of World War II, Poland became part of the Soviet-dominated communist bloc, whereas his city of birth found itself annexed by the Soviet Union and incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. All of his family, except for several cousins, were murdered by the Germans during the Holocaust.

In 1976, the London-based Polish government-in-exile, which, although largely unrecognized internationally, lingered on until communism in Poland finally collapsed and it dissolved itself in recognition of the now-democratically elected authorities in Warsaw, awarded Ulam the Commanders’ Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, one of Poland’s highest state awards.

Stanisław Ulam died of a heart attack in Santa Fe on May 13, 1984, exactly one month after his 75th birthday. His widow, Françoise Aron Ulam, buried him in her own country, at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, and was laid to rest by his side when she died in 2011.

Their only daughter, Claire Ulam Weiner (1944–2020), served as a consultant when her father’s 1976 autobiography “Adventures of a Mathematician” was adapted on screen by German film director Thorsten Klein with an international cast and crew. The German, Polish, and British co-production was released in early 2020, and Claire could still see the story of her father on screen before she passed away in December of that year.

Yes, that is correct. Stanisław Ulam does actually have a film telling his story. Based on a book he himself penned and filmed with the contribution of his family.

So if you believe that it is possible to make an interesting film about a person such as a physicist or a mathematician (apart from “Oppenheimer” and “The Imitation Game”, there is, after all, “A Beautiful Mind”, the acclaimed film about John Nash starring Russell Crowe), perhaps you might want to give “Adventures of a Mathematician” a go.'

[scienza-magia]

La prima bomba H ha cancellato un'isola del Pacifico

Il primo test di una bomba all’idrogeno, 70 anni fa. Cancellò dalla mappa l'isola su cui fu condotto, e diede inizio a una nuova era di deterrenza nucleare. Il 1° novembre del 1952, settant’anni fa, gli Stati Uniti fecero il primo test nucleare della storia con una bomba all’idrogeno. La bomba, che aveva il nome in codice Ivy Mike, era 500 volte più potente di quelle che pochi anni prima erano state sganciate sulle città giapponesi di Hiroshima e Nagasaki e che posero fine alla Seconda guerra mondiale. Il test eliminò dalla carta geografica l’isoletta disabitata del Pacifico su cui era stato condotto, e diede avvio a una nuova e più pericolosa fase della Guerra fredda, aprendo alla possibilità che un conflitto nucleare avrebbe davvero potuto significare l’estinzione dell’umanità. Semplificando moltissimo, in una bomba nucleare tradizionale (detta anche “bomba A”) si sviluppa una reazione di fissione nucleare, in cui il nucleo di un atomo – di molti atomi in realtà – viene “spezzato” in due parti liberando energia, che poi è l’energia distruttiva della bomba. In una bomba a idrogeno (detta anche “bomba H”, dal simbolo dell’idrogeno, o “bomba termonucleare”) la fissione nucleare viene usata per innescare una fusione nucleare, in cui i nuclei di due atomi di idrogeno si uniscono assieme per formare un atomo di elio. Questa seconda reazione genera molta più energia della prima a parità di masse in gioco, e per questo fu usata per amplificare la potenza della bomba nucleare convenzionale. Si parla inoltre di bomba “all’idrogeno” perché il combustibile termonucleare è composto da isotopi dell’idrogeno.

1st April 1954: One hundred miles of sky covered by smoke and radioactivity from the first H-Bomb explosion (US) at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images) Della possibilità di usare la fusione nucleare per creare una bomba di eccezionale potenza si era cominciato a pensare prima ancora che fosse creata la tradizionale bomba A: nel 1941 ne parlarono, per esempio, i fisici Enrico Fermi ed Edward Teller, entrambi membri del Progetto Manhattan, il grande progetto segreto finanziato dal governo degli Stati Uniti durante la Seconda guerra mondiale che portò alla costruzione della bomba atomica. Dopo la Seconda guerra mondiale, però, il Progetto Manhattan fu di fatto sciolto e molti degli eminenti studiosi che ne facevano parte tornarono alle loro vite in università o nei centri studi. Benché l’amministrazione americana del presidente Harry Truman volesse proseguire con lo sviluppo e la ricerca sulle armi nucleari, vi fu tuttavia un periodo di stanca che durò qualche anno, anche perché usare la fusione nucleare per la costruzione di una bomba si rivelò estremamente difficile. Le cose cambiarono il 23 settembre del 1949, quando il presidente Truman annunciò pubblicamente di avere le prove che l’Unione Sovietica aveva testato una propria arma nucleare. Gli Stati Uniti smisero di essere l’unica potenza nucleare del mondo e cominciò l’era della deterrenza. A quel punto, l’amministrazione Truman decise di andare avanti con più decisione con i lavori per la realizzazione di una bomba a fusione nucleare, nonostante l’opposizione di vari esperti e scienziati, compreso il fisico Robert Oppenheimer, che era stato il capo del Progetto Manhattan. La decisione di lavorare a una bomba a fusione (che al tempo veniva chiamata “super bomba”) fu resa pubblica dall’amministrazione Truman, ma ovviamente le modalità e le tempistiche del progetto furono tenute segrete.

circa 1952: The mushroom cloud of fire and smoke rises 40,000 feet in two minutes after the Hydrogen Bomb explosion at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific. (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images) La grossa scoperta che rese possibile la costruzione della bomba H arrivò due anni dopo, nel 1951, quando Edward Teller e Stanislaw Ulam, due fisici che avevano partecipato al Progetto Manhattan, capirono che per realizzare una bomba termonucleare era necessario mettere assieme le due reazioni di fissione e fusione nucleare. Nelle bombe che usano il cosiddetto “design Teller-Ulam”, una fissione nucleare viene usata per innescare la più potente fusione: semplificando ancora una volta all’estremo, all’interno di una bomba H viene fatta scoppiare una bomba nucleare “convenzionale” per avviare la reazione di fusione. La decisione di costruire una “super bomba” usando il “design Teller-Ulam” fu presa nel giugno del 1951 e in poco più di un anno, a metà del 1952, era pronto un prototipo funzionante. La super bomba fu chiamata Ivy Mike, e chiaramente non era adatta per un utilizzo in combattimento: era un oggetto enorme, che pesava 82 tonnellate e occupava moltissimo spazio perché il deuterio (l’isotopo dell’idrogeno usato come combustibile della fusione) doveva essere mantenuto in forma liquida da un gigantesco impianto di refrigerazione. Per il test fu scelta l’isola di Elugelab, un’isoletta che faceva parte dell’atollo di Enewetak, che a sua volta fa parte delle Isole Marshall, nell’oceano Pacifico. Lo spostamento e il posizionamento della gigantesca Ivy Mike richiese l’utilizzo di una portaerei, il lavoro di migliaia di persone e la collaborazione di esercito, marina, aviazione e intelligence degli Stati Uniti. L’esplosione avvenne la mattina del 1° novembre del 1952: fu sprigionata un’energia di 10,4 megatoni, oltre 500 volte quella della bomba sganciata su Nagasaki in Giappone qualche anno prima (1 megatone è pari all’energia sviluppata dallo scoppio di un milione di tonnellate di tritolo). L’esplosione cancellò dalla carta geografica l’isola di Elugelab e cambiò la conformazione delle isole di fianco: creò un cratere di 1.900 metri di diametro di 50 metri di profondità. L’enorme fungo atomico arrivò a 41 chilometri di altezza e a 161 chilometri di diametro. La vegetazione di tutte le isole dell’atollo fu completamente rasa al suolo.

L’atollo di Enewetak in una foto aerea d’epoca, prima e dopo l’esplosione Straordinariamente i giornali del giorno dopo, sia quelli americani sia quelli internazionali, non riportarono la notizia del test. La sua realizzazione non era stata resa pubblica, e per qualche giorno l’amministrazione statunitense riuscì a mantenere il segreto, complice il fatto che le Isole Marshall erano molto remote e che i giornali americani erano concentrati sulle elezioni americane del 4 novembre, che sarebbero state vinte da Dwight Eisenhower. Come ha ricordato lo Smithsonian Magazine, il primo giornale a dare la notizia del test fu il Los Angeles Examiner l’8 novembre, basandosi sulla parola di un solo testimone oculare che aveva assistito all’esplosione da una delle navi di osservazione posizionate attorno.

Nei giorni successivi, poi, vari altri giornali cominciarono a ottenere nuove testimonianze, e nel giro di qualche settimana l’amministrazione americana confermò il test. Tempo dopo pubblicò uno dei video girati durante l’esplosione, che è tuttora uno dei più celebri e impressionanti di quell’epoca. Negli Stati Uniti la notizia del test della bomba H fu accolta al tempo stesso con orrore e con sollievo di esserci arrivati per primi. Il test fu condannato dall’Unione Sovietica, che tuttavia si mise immediatamente al lavoro per costruire una propria bomba all’idrogeno. Fece il suo primo test appena tre anni dopo, nel 1955, anche grazie alle intuizioni di Andrei Sakharov, il grande fisico che poi sarebbe diventato dissidente e avrebbe ricevuto il Nobel per la Pace. Nel 1961 l’Unione Sovietica testò in un’isola artica la cosiddetta Bomba Zar, la più potente bomba H mai fatta esplodere, con una potenza di oltre 50 megatoni, contro i 10 di Ivy Mike.

Il grande buco nell’atollo di Enewetak dove un tempo c’era l’isoletta di Elugelab, visibile su Google Maps Read the full article

[sciencespies]

How the U.S. hydrogen bomb secrets disappeared

https://sciencespies.com/physics/how-the-u-s-hydrogen-bomb-secrets-disappeared/

How the U.S. hydrogen bomb secrets disappeared

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Given a choice of items to lose on a train, a top-secret document detailing the newly developed hydrogen bomb should be on the bottom of the list. In January 1953, amid the Red Scare and the Korean War, that’s exactly what physicist John Archibald Wheeler lost.

In the December 2019 issue of Physics Today, science historian Alex Wellerstein details the creation of the document and Wheeler’s day leading up to its mysterious loss.

“I like the absurdity of the sequence of events, but beyond the absurdity, it connects up with some bigger Cold War themes,” he said.

Wellerstein, from the Stevens Institute of Technology, collects FBI files of physicists, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, as part of his research into the history of nuclear secrecy.

“Theoretical physicists were in particular targeted by the FBI and anti-Communists during the Cold War, both because they were thought to know the secrets of nuclear weapons, and because they were considered politically naïve,” he said. “Together, it made for a dangerous combination.”

Wheeler is perhaps best known for coining the term “black hole,” and his contributions to physics span different fields of study to include the hydrogen bomb project. When the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy decided to compile a history of the hydrogen bomb as part of a smear campaign against controversial physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, they sent a six-page extract to Wheeler to ensure the accuracy of the report’s technical aspects. The pages contained information about the discoveries of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam that led to the creation of thermonuclear weapons.

Wheeler read the document overnight on a sleeper train. After reading it, he recalled placing it into a white envelope, putting the white envelope into a manila envelope, then the manila envelope into his suitcase, and placing his suitcase in between himself and the wall of the train.

When Wheeler used the lavatory the following morning, he took the manila envelope out of his suitcase and into the stall with him but mistakenly left it there. He returned and retrieved it, but when he opened it later, the white envelope inside was missing, with the secret hydrogen bomb history inside of it.

The FBI dismantled the train car, searched the entirety of the rail line, tried to track down a list of passengers and conducted investigations on Wheeler and others involved, but their efforts were fruitless. The document was gone.

Wellerstein said the “lurid details” are what made him want to dig further into this story.

“There was one moment where John Wheeler is standing to peer at a guy sitting at a toilet on a train to see if he has a secret document in his hand,” Wellerstein said. “When I read that, I was hooked.”

Though its loss derailed multiple careers and was part of the sequence of events that led to Oppenheimer’s famous security hearing, the mystery of whatever happened to those six pages in the white envelope remains.

“I find it very likely that he did read the document on the train, because his memory of that was very distinct, but then the fuzzy part comes in. Did Wheeler put it back correctly?” asked Wellerstein. “And if he didn’t put it back correctly, what happened to it?”

“My personal favorite theory is that the porter found it and just threw it away, because he would have known there’s no way this would have worked out well for him, and he’d have been better off to just pretend he never saw it,” Wellerstein joked. “I would love for it to be a spy, because that would be much more exciting. But there’s no evidence of that, and there are a lot of reasons to think that’s very improbable.”

As for Wheeler, despite the dire punishments for mishandling nuclear secrets, he got off with only a letter of rebuke from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

“He was too valuable as a scientist,” Wellerstein said. “They said they couldn’t punish him without hurting the nuclear program.”

Explore further

Wheeler says FCC won’t allow Internet ‘slow lane’

More information: Alex Wellerstein. John Wheeler’s H-bomb blues, Physics Today (2019). DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.4364

Provided by American Institute of Physics

Citation: How the U.S. hydrogen bomb secrets disappeared (2019, December 4) retrieved 4 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-hydrogen-secrets.html

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#Physics

[att-tactical]

Did everyone thing the Germans forgot our Manhattan Project Team? Among the scientists who fled Europe were Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, James Franck, Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, and Klaus Fuchs. Enrico Fermi's wife Laura was Jewish; after the 1938 Nobel Prize ceremony, he and his family left for the United States.  Joseph Rotblat returned home to Poland and left days before the outbreak of World War II. Tragically, his wife was unable to accompany him and later died during the Holocaust in a concentration camp. Stanislaw Ulam fled Poland with his brother Adam shortly before the German invasion in September 1939. The rest of Ulam’s family, including his parents and sister, were killed in the Holocaust. If we had not emigrated those Jewish Scientists, the Nazi's would have had "The Bomb" first. https://www.instagram.com/p/B9xTczXJQvo/?igshid=s0lqf2w20g3q

[ultimavoce]

Bomba all'idrogeno perché è più potente della bomba atomica ?

La #bombaallidrogeno o #bombaH è l'ordigno nucleare più potente creato dall'uomo. Dal punto di vista militare rappresenta un'evoluzione della #bombaatomica  "semplice".

Come funziona la bomba all’idrogeno ?

La bomba all’idrogeno o bomba H è l’ordigno nucleare più potente creato dall’uomo.

Dal punto di vista militare rappresenta un’evoluzione della bomba atomica  “semplice”. Il suo funzionamento si basa su una reazione a fusione termonucleare molto simile a quella che avviene all’interno del Sole.

Nella bomba atomica “tradizionale” avviene un processo di fissione…

[positivederivative]

October 27, 2017 at 12:56AM

Today I Learned: 1) In 2004, Equatorial Guinea was ruled by a dictator named Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. As dictators go, he ranks somewhere in the range from "brutal" to "godawful". I don't know a ton of details about Mbasogo's rule, but I *do* know that he a) got into power by killing his Uncle (who, admittedly, was also pretty awful), b) is, officially, the country's god, with a direct permanent line of communication to the Almighty, and is bestowed with the magical ability to kill without going to hell for it, and c) regularly comes up on lists of "worst African dictator". So... not a good guy, not a good government. Anyway, in 2004, a bunch of London financial types with a lot of money decided they'd had enough of Mbasogo... existing. So they hired an army of 64 mercenaries (mostly ex-South-African) and all the equipment they'd need to take out Mbasogo, and asked them to do just that. The... plot? Job? War? Whatever it was, it ended before it really started. There's direct and indirect evidence that the US, UK, and Spanish governments may have known about the planned attack, but it was the *Zimbabwean* government that stopped them by arresting their plane while it was in a Zimbabwean airport. The soldiers were jailed, tortured, and at least one has died. A few of the financiers were fined and jailed for a few years; others have gotten away without a charge sticking. 2) ...how to take jacket measurements. Roughly. Better than I knew before, anyway. 3) Andy Halleran and I were curious about who invented Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), the modern scientist's Favorite Algorithm™, so we looked it up. It looks like MCMC was first published in 1953 out of Los Alamos. The authors are Nicholas Metropolis*, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, Augusta Teller, and Edward Teller, but there are at least a couple of claims that Nicholas and Augusta didn't really do anything on the paper. The more general Monte Carlo class of algorithms seems to have been quietly invented by Enrico Fermi, but he didn't publish it and nobody heard about it. Later on, Stanislaw Ulam (of cellular automaton and thermonuclear bomb fame) and... *sigh*. John von Neumann. Of *course* it was Johnvon Neumann. Anyway, they reinvented Monte Carlo methods while working on neutron penetration of radiation shielding. They turned out to be critical for simulations used to build the bomb, and, later, just about everything. * Of Metropolis-Hastings algorithm fame. Hastings was the first author of the *second* critical paper on MCMC, that generalized the first paper's strategy from one particularly tricky integral to functions-in-general.

[renato-carranza]

Bomba de hidrógeno

Bomba de hidrógeno. Conocida como la bomba más destructiva jamás creada. Es una realidad.

Historia

Tambi��n conocida como bomba de fusión, bomba termonuclear o bomba H; nació como idea del físico húngaro–estadounidense Edward Teller que estaba obsesionado con la fusión nuclear en los 40’.

No fue hasta finales de la década, que tomó importancia el proyecto y apareció el matemático Stanislaw Ulam,…

[oldbeavers-blog]

Edward Teller

(b. Jan. 15, 1908, Budapest, Hungery., Austria-Hungery.—d. Sept. 9, 2003,

Stanford, California, U.S.)

Edward Teller was a Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist who participated in the production of the first atomic bomb (1945) and who led the development of the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb. Teller, born Ede Teller, was from a family of prosperous  Hungarian Jews. After attending schools in Budapest, he earned a degree in chemical engineering at the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Ger. He then went to Munich

and Leipzig to earn a Ph.D. in physical chemistry (1930). His doctoral thesis, on the hydrogen molecular ion, helped lay the foundation for a theory of molecular orbitals that remains widely accepted today. While a student in Munich, Teller fell under a moving streetcar and lost his right foot, which was replaced with an artificial one. During the years of the Weimar Republic, Teller was absorbed with atomic physics, first studying under Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and then teaching at the University of Göttingen (1931–33). In 1935 Teller and his bride, Augusta Harkanyi, went to the United States, where he taught at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Together with his colleague George Gamow, he established new rules for classifying the ways subatomic particles can escape the nucleus during radioactive decay. Following Bohr’s stunning report on the fission of the uranium atom in 1939 and inspired by the words of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had called for scientists to act to defend the United States against Nazism, Teller resolved to devote his energies to developing nuclear weapons. By 1941 Teller had taken out U.S. citizenship and joined Enrico Fermi’s team at the University of Chicago in the epochal experiment to produce the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Teller then accepted an invitation from the University of California at Berkeley to work on theoretical studies on the atomic bomb with J. Robert Oppenheimer; and when Oppenheimer set up the secret Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico in 1943, Teller was among the first men recruited. Although the Los Alamos assignment was to build a fission bomb, Teller digressed more and more from the main line of research to continue his own inquiries into a potentially much more powerful thermonuclear hydrogen fusion bomb. At

war’s end he wanted the U.S. government’s nuclear

weapons development priorities shifted to the hydrogen

bomb. Hiroshima, however, had had a profound effect on

Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists,

and few had the desire to continue in nuclear weapons

research.

Teller accepted a position with the Institute for

Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago in 1946 but

returned to Los Alamos as a consultant for extended

periods. The Soviet Union’s explosion of an atomic bomb

in 1949 made him more determined that the United States

have a hydrogen bomb, but the Atomic Energy

Commission’s general advisory committee, which was

headed by Oppenheimer, voted against a crash program to

develop one. The debate was settled by the confession of

the British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs that he had been

spying for the Soviet Union since 1942. Fuchs had known

of the American interest in a hydrogen bomb and had

passed along early American data on it to the Soviets. In

response, President Harry Truman ordered the go-ahead

on the weapon, and Teller laboured on at Los Alamos to

make it a reality.

Teller and his colleagues at Los Alamos made little

actual progress in designing a workable thermonuclear

device until early in 1951, when the physicist Stanislaw

Marcin Ulam proposed to use the mechanical shock of an

atomic bomb to compress a second fissile core and make it

explode; the resulting high density would make the burn-

ing of the second core’s thermonuclear fuel much more

efficient. Teller in response suggested that radiation,

rather than mechanical shock, from the atomic bomb’s

explosion be used to compress and ignite the thermo-

nuclear second core. Together these new ideas provided a

firm basis for a fusion weapon, and a device using the

Teller-Ulam configuration, as it is now known, was suc-

cessfully tested at Enewetak atoll in the Pacific on Nov. 1,

1952; it yielded an explosion equivalent to 10 million tons

(10 megatons) of TNT.

Teller was subsequently credited with developing the

world’s first thermonuclear weapon, and he became known

in the United States as “the father of the H-bomb.” Ulam’s

key role in conceiving the bomb design did not emerge

from classified government documents and other sources

until nearly three decades after the event. Still, Teller’s

stubborn pursuit of the weapon in the face of skepticism,

and even hostility, from many of his peers played a major

role in the bomb’s development.

At the U.S. government hearings held in 1954 to deter-

mine whether Oppenheimer was a security risk, Teller’s

testimony was decidedly unsympathetic to his former

chief. “I would feel personally more secure,” he told the

inquiry board, “if public matters would rest in other

hands.” After the hearings’ end, Oppenheimer’s security

clearance was revoked, and his career as a science adminis-

trator was at an end. Although Teller’s testimony was by

no means the decisive factor in this outcome, many prom-

inent American nuclear physicists never forgave him for

what they viewed as his betrayal of Oppenheimer.

Teller was instrumental in the creation of the United

States’ second nuclear weapons laboratory, the Lawrence

Livermore Laboratory, in Livermore, Calif., in 1952. For

almost the next four decades it was the United States’

chief factory for making thermonuclear weapons. Teller

was associate director of Livermore from 1954 to 1958 and

from 1960 to 1975, and he was its director in 1958–60.

Concurrently he was professor of physics at the Univer-

sity of California at Berkeley from 1953 to 1960 and was

professor-at-large there until 1970.

A staunch anticommunist, Teller devoted much time

in the 1960s to his crusade to keep the United States ahead

of the Soviet Union in nuclear arms. He opposed the 1963

Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear weapons

testing in the atmosphere, and he was a champion of

Project Plowshare, an unsuccessful federal government

program to find peaceful uses for atomic explosives. In the

1970s Teller remained a prominent government adviser on

nuclear weapons policy, and in 1982–83 he was a major

influence in President Ronald Reagan’s proposal of the

Strategic Defense Initiative, an attempt to create a

defense system against nuclear attacks by the Soviet

Union. In 2003 Teller was awarded the Presidential Medal

of Freedom.

[renato-carranza]

Bomba de hidrógeno

Bomba de hidrógeno. Conocida como la bomba más destructiva jamás creada. Es una realidad.

Historia

También conocida como bomba de fusión, bomba termonuclear o bomba H; nació como idea del físico húngaro–estadounidense Edward Teller que estaba obsesionado con la fusión nuclear en los 40’.

No fue hasta finales de la década, que tomó importancia el proyecto y apareció el matemático Stanislaw Ulam,…

[cyarsk5230]

Since the movie about Oppenheimer is in theaters now, here’s what you need to know about the story behind the film that people are talking about

trigger warning: this deals with nuclear weapons and bombs so anyone who has dealt with nuclear disasters or near nuclear disasters may want to skip reading this post

Why Robert Oppenheimer's Atomic Bomb Still Haunts Us

— By Richard Rhodes | Published May 15, 2013

Oppenheimer spearheaded the creation of the atom bomb. René Burri/Magnum

Robert Oppenheimer oversaw the design and construction of the first atomic bombs. The American theoretical physicist wasn't the only one involved—more than 130,000 people contributed their skills to the World War II Manhattan Project, from construction workers to explosives experts to Soviet spies—but his name survives uniquely in popular memory as the names of the other participants fade. British philosopher Ray Monk's lengthy new biography of the man is only the most recent of several to appear, and Oppenheimer wins significant assessment in every history of the Manhattan Project, including my own. Why this one man should have come to stand for the whole huge business, then, is the essential question any biographer must answer.

It's not as if the bomb program were bereft of men of distinction. Gen. Leslie Groves built the Pentagon and thousands of other U.S. military installations before leading the entire Manhattan Project to success in record time. Hans Bethe discovered the sequence of thermonuclear reactions that fire the stars. Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi invented the nuclear reactor. John von Neumann conceived the stored-program digital computer. Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam co-invented the hydrogen bomb. Luis Alvarez devised a whole new technology for detonating explosives to make the Fat Man bomb work, and later, with his son, Walter, proved that an Earth-impacting asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. The list goes on. What was so special about Oppenheimer?

He was brilliant, rich, handsome, charismatic. Women adored him. As a young professor at Berkeley and Caltech in the 1930s, he broke the European monopoly on theoretical physics, contributing significantly to making America a physics powerhouse that continues to win a freight of Nobel Prizes. Despite never having directed any organization before, he led the Los Alamos bomb laboratory with such skill that even his worst enemy, Edward Teller, told me once that Oppenheimer was the best lab director he'd ever known. After the war he led the group of scientists who guided American nuclear policy, the General Advisory Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). He finished out his life as director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he welcomed young scientists and scholars into that traditionally aloof club.

August 9, 1945: Nagasaki is hit by an atom bomb. Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum/EPA

Those were exceptional achievements, but they don't by themselves explain his unique place in nuclear history. For that, add in the dark side. His brilliance came with a casual cruelty, born certainly of insecurity, which lashed out with invective against anyone who said anything he considered stupid; even the brilliant Bethe wasn't exempt. His relationships with the significant women in his life were destructive: his first deep love, Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a Berkeley professor, was a suicide; his wife, Kitty, a lifelong alcoholic. His daughter committed suicide; his son continues to live an isolated life.

His choices or mistakes, combined with his penchant for humiliating lesser men, eventually destroyed him.

Oppenheimer's achievements as a theoretical physicist never reached the level his brilliance seemed to promise; the reason, his student and later Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger judged, was that he "very much insisted on displaying that he was on top of everything"—a polite way of saying Oppenheimer was glib. The physicist Isidor Rabi, a Nobel laureate colleague whom Oppenheimer deeply respected, thought he attributed too much mystery to the workings of nature. Monk notes his curiously uncritical respect for the received wisdom of his field.

Monk's discussion of Oppenheimer's work in physics is one of his book's great contributions to the saga, an area of the man's life that previous biographies have neglected. In the late 1920s Oppenheimer first worked out the physics of what came to be called black holes, those collapsing giant stars that pull even light in behind them as they shrink to solar-system or even planetary size. Some have speculated Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel for that work had he lived to see the first black hole identified in 1971.

Oppenheimer with Albert Einstein, circa the 1940s. Corbis

Oppenheimer's patriotism should have been evident to even the most obtuse government critic. He gave up his beloved physics, after all, not to mention any vestige of personal privacy, to help make his country invulnerable with atomic bombs. Yet he risked his work and reputation by dabbling in left-wing and communist politics before the war and lying to security officers during the war about a solicitation to espionage he received. His choices or mistakes, combined with his penchant for humiliating lesser men, eventually destroyed him.

One of those lesser men, a vicious piece of work named Lewis Strauss, a former shoe salesman turned Wall Street financier and physicist manqué, was the vehicle of Oppenheimer's destruction. When President Eisenhower appointed Strauss to the chairmanship of the AEC in the summer of 1953, Strauss pieced together a case against Oppenheimer. He was still splenetic from an extended Oppenheimer drubbing delivered during a congressional hearing all the way back in 1948, and he believed the physicist was a Soviet spy.

Strauss proceeded to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance, effectively shutting him out of government. Oppenheimer could have accepted his fate and returned to an academic life filled with honors; he was due to be dropped as an AEC consultant anyway. He chose instead to fight the charges. Strauss found a brutal prosecuting attorney to question the scientist, bugged his communications with his attorney, and stalled giving the attorney the clearances he needed to vet the charges. The transcript of the hearing In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the great, dark documents of the early atomic age, almost Shakespearean in its craven parade of hostile witnesses through the government star chamber, with the victim himself, catatonic with shame, sunken on a couch incessantly smoking the cigarettes that would kill him with throat cancer at 63 in 1967.

Rabi was one of the few witnesses who stood up for his friend, finally challenging the hearing board in exasperation, "We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it [because of Oppenheimer's work], and what more do you want, mermaids?" What Strauss and others, particularly Edward Teller, wanted was Oppenheimer's head on a platter, and they got it. The public humiliation, which he called "my train wreck," destroyed him. Those who knew him best have told me sadly that he was never the same again.

For Monk as for Rabi, Oppenheimer's central problem was his hollow core, his false sense of self, which Rabi with characteristic wit framed as an inability to decide whether he wanted to be president of the Knights of Columbus or B'nai B'rith. The German Jews who were Oppenheimer's 19th-century forebears had worked hard at assimilation—that is, at denying their religious heritage. Oppenheimer's parents submerged that heritage further in New York's ethical-culture movement that salvaged the humanism of Judaism while scrapping the supernatural overburden. Oppenheimer, actor that he was, could fit himself to almost any role, but turned either abject or imperious when threatened. He was a great lab director at Los Alamos because of his intelligence—"He was much smarter than the rest of us," Bethe told me—because of his broad knowledge and culture; because of his psychological insight into the complicated personalities of the gifted men assembled there to work on the bomb; most of all because he decided to play that role, as a patriotic citizen, and played it superbly.

Monk is a levelheaded and congenial guide to Oppenheimer's life, his biography certainly the best that has yet come along. But he devotes far too many pages to Oppenheimer's Depression-era flirtation with communism, a dead letter long ago and one that speaks more of a rich esthete's awakening to the suffering in the world than to Oppenheimer's political convictions. He doesn't always get the science right. Most of the errors are trivial, but a few are important to the story.

Their fundamental objection was to giving up production of real weapons so that Teller could pursue his pipe dream, a dead-end hydrogen bomb design.

A fundamental reason Oppenheimer opposed a crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb in response to the first Soviet atomic-bomb test in 1949 was the requirement of Edward Teller's "Super" design for large amounts of a rare isotope of hydrogen, tritium. Tritium is bred by irradiating lithium in a nuclear reactor, but the slugs of lithium take up space that would otherwise be devoted to breeding plutonium. To make tritium for a hydrogen bomb that the U.S. did not know how to build would have required sacrificing most of the U.S. production of plutonium for devastating atomic bombs the U.S. did know how to build. To Oppenheimer and the other scientists on the GAC, such an irresponsible substitution as an answer to the Soviet bomb made no strategic sense. It's true that the hydrogen bomb with its potentially unlimited scale of destruction made no military sense to them either—and was morally repugnant to some of them as well. But their fundamental objection, which Monk overlooks, was to giving up production of real weapons so that Teller could pursue his pipe dream, a dead-end hydrogen bomb design that never worked.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967)

More egregious is Monk's notion that the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer's mentor during the war on the international implications of the new technology, pushed for the bomb's use on Japan to make its terror manifest. He did not. He pushed, to the contrary, for the Allies, the Soviet Union included, to discuss the implications of the bomb prior to its use and to devise a framework for controlling it. Bohr foresaw that the bomb would stalemate major war, as it has, but correctly feared that U.S. secrecy about its development would lead to a U.S.-Soviet arms race. He conferred with both Roosevelt and Churchill about presenting the fact of the bomb to the Russians as a common danger to the world, like a new epidemic disease, that needed to be quarantined by common agreement. Churchill vehemently disagreed, and Roosevelt was old and ill. The moment passed. The arms race followed, as Bohr foresaw, and with diminished force, among pariah states like Iran and North Korea, continues to this day.

Monk's Oppenheimer is a less appealing figure than the Oppenheimer of previous biographies, perhaps because, as an Englishman, Monk is less susceptible to Oppenheimer's rhetorical gifts and more candid about calling out his evasions. He pulls together most of what several generations of Oppenheimer scholars have found and offers new revelations as well. Yet there's a faint whiff of condescension in his portrait, and the real Oppenheimer, the man whom so many loved and admired, still somehow escapes him. He misses the deep alignment of Robert Oppenheimer's life with Greek tragedy, the charismatic hubris that was his glory but also the flaw that brought him low. But maybe I'm expecting too much: maybe only a large work of fiction could assemble that critical mass.

[un-ionizetheradlab]

Fascinating.

If you have not watched Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus yet, there is still time to see it in theaters. A 100-day cinema run is a rarity these days, and the fact Nolan was able to secure it attests to his clout in Hollywood. But brilliant as it is, the film is not without faults, although most will go unnoticed by regular viewing audiences and only miff the worst of nitpickers. But Poles are particularly peeved whenever our contribution to great historical events is erased from the narrative for the sake of pacing.

To set the record straight right from the get-go, this is not intended as a criticism of Nolan’s film. But it is vexing to see the Polish contribution treated like something most easily disposed of when the story needs to be simplified. Even in the old days, when films such as 1969's “The Battle of Britain” and 1977's “A Bridge Too Far” were made, Poles got slightly more respect than Rodney Dangerfield.

Nowadays, we see films such as the 2014 film “The Imitation Game,” which tells the story of Alan Turing and his Bletchley Park team of codebreakers working on cracking the Enigma code. As Dr. Grażyna Żebrowska, an adviser at the Polish embassy in D.C., said of the film, “there was an audible sigh in Polish cinemas when [its] contribution was reduced to just one line.”

But Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski, who broke the code back in 1932 and whose work later allowed Turing to crack successive, more sophisticated versions of the Enigma, were absent from the film, and, after all, it is a film about Turing, not about them. Perhaps they deserve their own film?

Similarly, “Oppenheimer” is a story about none other than Robert Oppenheimer. But with so many characters, many of whom the audience will probably struggle to even remember the names of (those strange foreign names, like Teller, Szilard, Fermi, Bethe, Bohr, Lomanitz, Alvarez, Rabi, and a certain inconspicuous old man named Einstein), it just seems almost deliberate that not once is Stanisław Ulam even mentioned.

There is no point in wallowing in self-pity. If Nolan did not think Ulam was an interesting enough character to include in his picture, let him have his way. In the meantime, here is the story of Stanisław Ulam, who, like Rejewski, Różycki, and Zygalski, probably deserves his own film.

Stanisław Ulam was born on April 13, 1909, in Lviv, modern-day Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and known by the Polish name Lwów, or Lemberg in German.

He was the son of Józef and Anna. His father was a lawyer, and the well-off Ulams were assimilated into Polish culture, which is attested to by the fact that Stanisław received a typically Polish name associated with two Polish Roman Catholic saints.

The outbreak of World War I forced the family to leave the city, which fell to the Russians before being retaken by the Central Powers later in the war. His father being a staff officer of the reserve mobilized for the war effort, the family moved around the Habsburg empire during wartime, initially to Vienna and then to Moravská Ostrava in what is now the Czech Republic. It was during that time that Stanisław learned German. But young Ulam did not only have a knack for languages. His mind was definitely mathematically oriented.

Even at a young age, he displayed a genius for numbers and would independently come up with solutions to mathematical problems he encountered before learning about how to solve them later in school. His father initially wanted Stanisław to study law and take over the family business but recognized that his son’s talents lay elsewhere, and ultimately Stanisław Ulam went on to study engineering at the Lviv Polytechnic in 1927.

But it seems that engineering was a bit too practical for him. He would spend more time attending courses in math taught by such great minds as Stefan Banach than engineering classes. Ultimately, he decided to pose himself a challenge: should he successfully solve a yet unsolved mathematical problem, he would abandon engineering in favor of studying mathematics.

After all that we have learned about him, will it be a surprise to anyone that Stanisław Ulam ultimately received his doctorate’s degree in mathematics at just 24?

Lviv was a major hub of what is now called the Polish School of Mathematics, which achieved many breakthroughs in the field during the interwar period. It was a great place for forward-thinking mathematicians, but Ulam thought it unlikely that he would be able to attain a professorship in his home country. Mathematics being a universal language, he therefore went on to lecture abroad, initially in Western Europe and then in the U.S.

Ulam lectured at Princeton and then at Harvard. In the summer of 1939, he briefly returned to Poland to collect his younger brother, Adam, who got into Brown University and went on to become a prominent scholar (philosopher, historian, political scientist, Sovietologist, and Harvard professor) in his own right.

While on their way across the Atlantic, the brothers learned of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact via the wireless and of the German invasion once they arrived in the U.S. Stanisław and Adam would be the only members of their immediate family to survive the war, while the rest perished in the Holocaust.

In 1940, Stanisław Ulam got the post of professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he also met his wife, Françoise Aron, a French student of English literature. Next year, he was also granted U.S. citizenship. With his country of birth under brutal occupation and with the U.S. bracing itself for the inevitability of joining the conflict, Ulam felt a need to contribute to the war effort, but he was turned back by the military on account of his poor eyesight (this was also the case with his brother). But he continued to seek an opportunity to work for the army, and in 1943 he was recommended for the Manhattan Project.

The recommendation came for Hans Bethe, whom you could see in Nolan’s film portrayed by Gustaf Skarsgård (yes, of the Skarsgårds).

To put it in brief, Ulam’s job at Los Alamos entailed him doing the thing he was best at, which was coming up with novel and innovative solutions on how to calculate things that were not even theorized about before. The physicists came up with the theory, and when they stumbled upon a problem, they tasked Ulam with doing the calculations.

As the project was nearing completion, some of the scientists at Los Alamos, including Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and Stanisław Ulam, were delegated to a branching out “Super” bomb project, which would eventually evolve into the hydrogen bomb. In essence, a hydrogen bomb uses a nuclear bomb (which operates on the principle of splitting atoms, known as nuclear fission) as a charge to launch the process of nuclear fusion, during which atoms of hydrogen are rammed together with enough power to fuse into atoms of heavier elements. To realize how powerful a reaction that is, you have to do nothing more than look up at the Sun.

In 1945, Ulam was struck by a bout of acute encephalitis but managed to recover following emergency surgery, although he did briefly lose the ability to speak, and he feared that the illness could have adversely influenced his mental faculties. Reportedly, after waking up from the post-surgery coma, he was unable to answer the doctor’s question as to what is the product of adding 13 and 8, but upon being asked what is the root of 20, he answered that it was about 4.4. Ulam’s illness had also caused a brief panic at Los Alamos, one reason being the fear that in his fragile state he might spill some secrets and the other being the supposition that his condition may have been caused by radiation, although this turned out not to be the case.

In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear bomb. Its development was facilitated by several scientists working for the Manhattan Project who were either spies motivated by communist ideas or were morally apprehensive about the imbalance of power caused by only one country being in possession of such a powerful weapon.

Yes, because what could possibly be wrong with the proposition that a balance must be maintained between democracies and genocidal dictatorships by giving the latter access to weapons of mass destruction?

This galvanized the U.S. effort to develop an even more powerful “super” bomb, the hydrogen (or thermonuclear) bomb mentioned earlier. Edward Teller headed the project, but the work appeared to be going nowhere as there was no immediately apparent method to exert enough force on hydrogen atoms to start the fusion reaction. Ever the innovator, Ulam suggested some tweaks to the design, which inspired Teller to change it even further and eventually come up with what eventually became the Teller-Ulam design (or configuration), which the two presented in a classified paper in early 1951. The first thermonuclear bomb was successfully tested the next year.

It is odd that anyone would want to compete for the dubious honor of inventing a weapon with a destructive force thousands of times stronger than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the only one who appeared to want the honor purely for himself appeared to be Teller, who went so far as to say that Ulam himself never believed in the design and merely signed the paper upon Teller’s request, thinking that otherwise no one would believe in its feasibility.

It is impossible to know the definite truth, as the documentation remains classified even seven decades later, but other people involved in developing the H-bomb credited both Teller and Ulam to a greater or lesser extent equally, and perhaps Hans Bethe put it in the wittiest manner:

“After the H-bomb was made, reporters started to call Teller the father of the H-bomb. For the sake of history, I think it is more precise to say that Ulam is the father, because he provided the seed, and Teller is the mother because he remained with the child. As for me, I guess I am the midwife.”

As for Ulam himself, he claimed in his autobiography titled “Adventures of a Mathematician”, that he believed the development of a weapon so powerful would make the war an impossibility, except if someone made a mistake.

As we know with the power of hindsight, Ulam was a brilliant mathematician but not much of a prophet. Fortunately, thermonuclear weapons have never yet been used in conflict.

And this is the story of Stanisław Ulam up to the point of the development of the hydrogen bomb. Afterward, he returned to academia and lectured at various U.S. universities. In the aftermath of World War II, Poland became part of the Soviet-dominated communist bloc, whereas his city of birth found itself annexed by the Soviet Union and incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. All of his family, except for several cousins, were murdered by the Germans during the Holocaust.

In 1976, the London-based Polish government-in-exile, which, although largely unrecognized internationally, lingered on until communism in Poland finally collapsed and it dissolved itself in recognition of the now-democratically elected authorities in Warsaw, awarded Ulam the Commanders’ Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, one of Poland’s highest state awards.

Stanisław Ulam died of a heart attack in Santa Fe on May 13, 1984, exactly one month after his 75th birthday. His widow, Françoise Aron Ulam, buried him in her own country, at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, and was laid to rest by his side when she died in 2011.

Their only daughter, Claire Ulam Weiner (1944–2020), served as a consultant when her father’s 1976 autobiography “Adventures of a Mathematician” was adapted on screen by German film director Thorsten Klein with an international cast and crew. The German, Polish, and British co-production was released in early 2020, and Claire could still see the story of her father on screen before she passed away in December of that year.

Yes, that is correct. Stanisław Ulam does actually have a film telling his story. Based on a book he himself penned and filmed with the contribution of his family.

So if you believe that it is possible to make an interesting film about a person such as a physicist or a mathematician (apart from “Oppenheimer” and “The Imitation Game”, there is, after all, “A Beautiful Mind”, the acclaimed film about John Nash starring Russell Crowe), perhaps you might want to give “Adventures of a Mathematician” a go.'