Word: thermonuclear
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...pistol is the thermonuclear strike force of the manned bombers and fighter-bombers of the U.S. Air Force, backed up by the Navy's far-ranging carrier planes and submarines. Operating out of 270-odd air bases in a score of countries, this thermonuclear strike force is poised all day, every day, to deliver a 360° assault (see map) against the 37,500-mile borders of the Soviet Union, each single aircraft capable of unloading on target the mighty equivalent of all the bombs dropped by all nations during World War II. Unlike the Kremlin's-headline...
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...
...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...
...Russians exploded "Joe One." Then, in late January 1950, a shocking bit of intelligence decided the issue: German-born British Physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed that he had passed atomic secrets to Communist agents. Fuchs had been present at Los Alamos when Teller & Co. reviewed all that was known about thermonuclear reactions. Four days after Fuchs's confession, Harry Truman directed AEC to go ahead with the H-bomb...
Luis Walter Alvarez, 46, sports-jacketed professor of physics and associate director of the University of California's Radiation Laboratory, has been called the "prize wild-idea man." Some prized wild ideas: isolation of tritium (used in thermonuclear weapons) and, with a graduate student, the discovery of helium 3 (1939); the universally used radar-operated Ground-Controlled Approach System for blind-flying aircraft (1942); a method of producing nuclear reaction without the presence of uranium or million-degree heat (1956). Born in San Francisco, the son of onetime Teacher and Mayo Clinic Physician (and now medical columnist) Walter Alvarez...