Ulam's calculations showed faults in our approach to the Hydrogen bomb

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Worries as John von Neumann confirms Ulam's calculations

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Ulam's calculations showed faults in our approach to the Hydrogen bomb

Edward Teller Scientist

	Views	Duration
101. Reasons for working on the hydrogen bomb while others wouldn't	384	05:32
102. President Truman's decision and other scientists' views on this	398	06:02
103. Ulam's calculations showed faults in our approach to the Hydrogen...	344	02:17
104. Worries as John von Neumann confirms Ulam's calculations	607	02:19
105. The idea of the equilibrium super	303	02:46
106. Discussing the compression ideas with Ulam	354	02:16
107. Scientifically testing the calculations	271	02:04
108. Tests to see whether the experiment worked	263	02:50
109. Presenting the new ideas to the Atomic Energy Commission	257	05:02
110. The right decision was reached, but only by chance	250	01:08

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What happened was that then, in early 1950, we had been planning a number of tests for the next year, for the spring of 1951. Everybody agreed that for that test series we should gather as much information as ever possible, and I, having planned to go back to Chicago in the summer of 1950, I now made up my mind. There was a possibility of the hydrogen bomb. I was at least going to stay another year. We planned, we calculated, and among the calculations a job done by one of my colleagues, Stan Ulam, was particularly important. There had been calculations about the planned hydrogen bomb which were, I have to admit, superficial. Ulam and his collaborators did not have a good a computing machine available, they did things by hand, and Ulam's collaborators did a very good job and found difficulties. In fact in their formulation which I don't think was really quite as definite as it should have been. But in their formulation our plans just wouldn't work.

The late Hungarian-American physicist Edward Teller helped to develop the atomic bomb and provided the theoretical framework for the hydrogen bomb. During his long and sometimes controversial career he was a staunch advocate of nuclear power and also of a strong defence policy, calling for the development of advanced thermonuclear weapons.

Title: Ulam's calculations showed faults in our approach to the Hydrogen bomb

Listeners: John H. Nuckolls

John H. Nuckolls was Director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1988 to 1994. He joined the Laboratory in 1955, 3 years after its establishment, with a masters degree in physics from Columbia. He rose to become the Laboratory's Associate Director for Physics before his appointment as Director in 1988.

Nuckolls, a laser fusion and nuclear weapons physicist, helped pioneer the use of computers to understand and simulate physics phenomena at extremes of temperature, density and short time scales. He is internationally recognised for his work in the development and control of nuclear explosions and as a pioneer in the development of laser fusion.

Duration: 2 minutes, 18 seconds

Date story recorded: June 1996

Date story went live: 24 January 2008