Word: hydrogen
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...scientists believed that they could manufacture a hydrogen bomb, an atomic bomb summoning up the same sort of fierce energy that gives the sun its heat. All that was needed was a way of forcing performance of a well-known scientific fact: if hydrogen atoms are converted into helium atoms, massive amounts of energy are released. The H-bomb could be at least 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, might well use the present A-bombs as mere matches to start the hydrogen on its way. It would, said the theorists, be capable...
After learning something about non-vacuum (gas-filled) tubes, Dr. Langmuir decided to reverse his field. His experimenting resulted in a high-vacuum transmitting tube, the heart of modern radio broadcasting.* Further work with gas and heat brought about the atomic hydrogen welding arc, which welds and fuses dissimilar metals...
Means for Suicide. To guess at all is starry-eyed, for atomic energy still means the Abomb, a world of terror, not of promise. Uranium fission is only a beginning. The building-up of hydrogen into helium, if it could be achieved, would theoretically yield vastly more energy-which could also be used for bombs. The quantum theorists, roaming in abstract ecstacy among their lacy equations, long ago entered a world where matter and energy are almost indistinguishable. They talk matter-of-factly of turning all of a sample of matter into energy. A single pound of anything, unfrozen...
Asked about a hydrogen bomb, the AECommissioners refused to comment. Said Chairman David E. Lilienthal: "All weapon information is classified...
...more than 10% of the fission energy present in its nuclear explosive. Perfect efficiency (probably impossible) would therefore give about ten times as much power, certainly not 1,000 times as much. So, figured the amateur physicists, the talkative Senator must have meant a bomb made out of hydrogen. It is well known that the conversion of hydrogen into helium is the nuclear reaction that gives the sun its energy...