Word: thermonuclear
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...some use. Bukharin even offered to turn over the Leningrad electrical works to Gamow for a few hours every night for experimentation. Gamow replied that no practical application was possible. But the incident stuck in his mind, and he was later to stir the interest of U.S. scientists in thermonuclear reactions like those inside the stars. (If the Communists ever decide to canonize Bukharin, whom they executed in 1938, they may claim him as the grandfather of the H-bomb...
...Gamow's interest in stellar reactions led Hans Bethe to calculate systematically all thermonuclear reactions. Says Teller: "Gamow had invented a new kind of game for the physicists, and Bethe proved to be the champion...
...scientist expected to be able to arrange thermonuclear reactions similar to those they studied in the stars; the required heat seemed unattainable. In 1938 Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission, and their discovery led directly to the Abomb. And fission, with its intense release of energy, also suggested that conditions could be created under which thermonuclear reactions might occur. The late Enrico Fermi in 1942 suggested to Teller that fission could be used to start thermonuclear reaction in deuterium (heavy hydrogen). "After a few weeks of hard thought," Teller recalls, "I decided that deuterium could not be ignited...
...never recaptured for me in the many years of hard work in which atomic bombs were developed . . . I am sure that all the participants in those discussions still remember vividly the days when we thought that the atomic bomb could be easily used for a steppingstone toward a thermonuclear explosion which we called a 'super' bomb...
...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...