Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Professor Gamow at George Washington. Teller studied thermonuclear reactions (fusion of hydrogen nuclei) in the stars. That pure-science undertaking was to have momentous consequences: it led to the development of the H-bomb...
...World War 11, scientists in the U.S. learned with alarm that physicists in Germany had succeeded in bringing about atomic fission. Shortly afterward, the U.S. incurred the first major installment of its massive debt to Hungarian-born scientists. Physicist Leo Szilard, leaping in thought from laboratory fission to atomic bomb, set out to urge the U.S. Government to get an atomic-research project going. Reasoning that a letter to President Roosevelt would have maximum impact if signed by Einstein, Szilard recruited his fellow Hungarian Edward Teller to chauffeur him out to Peconic Bay, N.Y., where Einstein was vacationing. Einstein signed...
...with Szilard on an atomic-energy project, Teller intended to go back to George Washington some day and resume his pure-science investigations into the minute structure of matter. That day never came. In 1943 he found himself heading to New Mexico to work at the Los Alamos A-bomb lab. Recalls Teller: "I was then on leave of absence from the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory [another atomic project], where I was on leave from Columbia, where I was on leave from George Washington." The snarled threads of his life were never to be straightened...
...Super. In the Manhattan Engineer District days, while the first A-bomb was still in the making, Teller's mind leaped ahead to the possibilities of a thermonuclear bomb repeating on earth the fusion that makes the stars glow. But at war's end he found most of his fellow scientists unwilling to work toward the "super." The deadly success of their A-bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had rocked the consciences of the atomic scientists. "The physicists have known sin," said Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Los Alamos' wartime director, and most of his colleagues agreed with...
When the Los Alamos bombmakers scattered, Teller accepted an invitation to work with Enrico Fermi at Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies. Teller kept urging an H-bomb program, but nobody seemed interested...