Word: ulam
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...headed the theoretical-physics division at Los Alamos during World War II, Teller's design began to fall apart shortly after Truman launched his H-bomb program. Teller's idea had been to use the heat of a conventional A-bomb to ignite a separate H-bomb. But Ulam, a brilliant mathematician, made a series of calculations that showed that the amount of tritium fuel required for Teller's bomb was prohibitive and that even when sparked by an A-bomb, it would probably not achieve fusion...
...breakthrough idea was the recognition that the fuel would burn more efficiently if it was compressed before it was heated. According to Bethe, Ulam approached Teller with a two-stage H-bomb design that used the shock waves from an A-bomb to compact the hydrogen and ignite the H-bomb. Teller adapted Ulam's design, using the energy of the A-bomb's radiation rather than the force of its shock waves to achieve the necessary compression. It was a bomb of this design, code named Mike, that exploded on Nov. 1, 1952, on the Pacific island of Elugelab...
...Fuchs did not give the Soviets the secret of the Teller-Ulam bomb, who did? Hirsch and Mathews suggest that Teller himself may have inadvertently - assisted the Soviets by pushing for an early test blast. The 1952 explosion peppered the atmosphere with a telltale assortment of radioactive debris, including new atomic elements that could have been created only by a compressed fusion reaction. When Hirsch and Mathews asked Bethe if that fallout could have tipped off the Soviets, Bethe instantly said yes. Says Hirsch: "It was as though he had been waiting 35 years for someone to ask him that...
...participant who welcomes Ulam's heightened status is his widow, Francoise Ulam, who will never forget the day she returned home for lunch to find her husband staring fixedly out the window. "I think I've found the way to make it work," he told her. "Make what work?" "The Super." Teller has partially confirmed his debt to Ulam. After suffering a heart attack in 1979, he dictated an account of the day Ulam walked into his office and said he had a way to make the bomb. Teller, though, heatedly disputes the notion that the key idea was Ulam...
...history may have already been rewritten. The revised account of Ulam's pivotal role appears in several new books, including a biography of Teller by Stanley Blumberg and Louis Panos to be published in February by Scribner's. And it is repeated in detail in the latest revision of the New Encyclopaedia Britannica, due out next month...