Word: thermonuclear
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Project Sherwood, the secret U.S. program to achieve controlled thermonuclear (atomic fusion) power, came ever so slightly into the open last week. After attending a secret conference of 350 Sherwood men at Gatlinburg, Tenn., Dr. Edward Teller, leading authority on thermonuclear processes, delivered a complicated paper before an unclassified meeting of the American Nuclear Society at Chicago...
Teller's speech did not give the present status of U.S. thermonuclear research, but it did give a great deal of background, new to most outsiders, about the path (or one of the paths) that Project Sherwood is following...
...size of Indiana, so that even if its shield were pierced, not more than one of its ships could be knocked out by any one existing weapon. As the admirals see it, that task force could appear on a given afternoon off any enemy coast, rain atomic-or thermonuclear-destruction, disperse rapidly, pop up the next afternoon to strike 600 miles away. With its extreme mobility on its ocean-wide base, the Navy could, at last, fight any kind...
...Albert Einstein perhaps put it most bluntly when he warned in 1950: "The hydrogen bomb appears on the public horizon as a probably attainable goal. . . .If successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, and hence annihilation of any life on earth, has been brought within the range of technical possibilities." Thermonuclear explosions in the Pacific have since shown that the goal has been attained, and that the possibilities of drastic damage to life on earth no longer remain purely technical, but now comprise one of the most frightening question-marks in world history: Can the human race survive the radiation effects...
Kurchatov's last paragraph must have tantalized his Harwell listeners: "On appraising the various approaches to the problem of obtaining intense thermonuclear reactions, we do not deem it possible to completely exclude further attempts to attain this goal by using pulsed discharges. However, other possibilities must also be carefully considered. Especially interesting are those in which the idea of stationary processes may be used...