HYDROGEN BOMB
When it became known in 1949 that the Soviet Union had developed the atomic bomb, thus pulling abreast of the United States in weapons capability, physicist Edward Teller, head of the Atomic Energy Commission Lewis Strauss, and other important government and military figures urged that the United States study the feasibility of producing a "superbomb" - the hydrogen bomb. They were opposed on moral and technical grounds by a group of other scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer. But President Harry S. Truman, spurred by the growing cold war, ordered a crash program to build the hydrogen bomb in February 1950.
After more than a year of work at Los Alamos, Teller, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, and other scientists solved the technical problems involved and scheduled a test of a prototype hydrogen bomb at Eniwetok Atoll. Oppenheimer and other scientists, who had been appointed to a Panel of Consultants on Disarmament, recommended that the test be postponed. They suggested that the United States approach the Russians with a proposal that both sides cease testing nuclear weapons and urged that the public be made more aware of the implications of such weapons. But Truman, told that a postponement this far in the countdown underway at the atoll would adversely affect the weapon's development, disregarded the panel's recommendation and ordered the test to proceed. The explosion on November 1, 1952, caused an island to disappear and created in its place a crater a mile wide and 175 feet deep. A deliverable bomb was subsequently developed and successfully tested in 1954. The Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb on August 12, 1953, and the British followed on May 15, 1957.
The hydrogen bomb is a thermonuclear weapon capable of devastating 150 square miles by blast, with searing heat effects and radioactive fallout for more than 800 square miles, depending on the size of the weapon. Its explosions are much larger than those of atomic (fission) bombs. The hydrogen bomb explosion is produced by nuclear fusion - the collision of neutrons with the nucleus of an unstable isotope of hydrogen, either deuterium or tritium, under high temperatures. Usually an atomic bomb inside the thermonuclear device triggers the fusion reaction.
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