Word: tellers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Alamos was established under the direction of Oppenheimer, to whom Teller gives unstinted credit for pushing A-bomb development "in time to have an influence upon the war." But Oppenheimer, Fermi and others did not lose sight of thermonuclear possibilities...
...After the Soviet atomic explosion and the subsequent Washington decision to press for an H-bomb, calculations based on the theories of Teller and others were set up on a machine called ENIAC. But there was fear that this electric brain would be too slow. Stan Ulam, a mathematician, with one helper, "undertook to execute the same job by straightforward hand computation. The next few months saw an amazing competition between the tortoise and the (electronic) hare." Ulam's "results were available even before the lengthy instructions to the machines had been completed . . . In a real emergency the mathematician...
...early 1951 a crude thermonuclear experiment had been set up at Eniwetok in the Pacific-Operation Greenhouse. Says Teller: "What remains most clear in my mind is the contrast between the spectacular explosion, which in itself meant nothing, and the small piece of paper handed to me by my good friend Louis Rosen, which showed that the experiment was a success...
...Greenhouse was not a bomb. On the hard road to the goal of the transportable bomb, Teller singles out two steps: an imaginative suggestion by Ulam and a fine calculation by Frederic de Hoffmann. Of De Hoffmann, Teller says...
...time the first H-bomb was to be exploded, Teller had left Los Alamos to organize a nuclear weapons laboratory at Livermore, Calif. ("Science . . . thrives on friendly competition"). He watched for the results of the first H-bomb, "Mike," on a University of California seismograph. Teller writes: "The room was completely dark except for the tiny luminous spot that the pencil of light threw on the photographic paper . . . Soon the luminous point gave me the feeling of being aboard a gently and irregularly moving vessel, so I braced a pencil on a piece of the apparatus and held it close...