In Los Alamos a new development was occurring, a development due in part, in very important part to Neddermeyer and to a contribution of Johnny von Neumann and myself: with a strong implosion one could make materials at more than the usual density. Several people have raised the question- Wouldn't the hydrogen bomb work better if you compressed it? And I said- No, no, no. Why? Because I got it in my mind that the hydrogen bomb will not work unless you could cut off the time, make the time short enough so that a mixture of radiation could not occur. Compression would speed up the desirable reactions, but equally speed up the emission of radiation, so in the end it would not count. When it began to look as though the original plans would not work, I was forced to review everything and at that point I got, late in 1950, an exceedingly simple idea: you try to compress. In the thermonuclear reaction what you would compress would be to a great extent hydrogen. That is easy to compress many-fold and when it is compressed, in the compressed state radiation would be present to a lesser extent proportional to the volume. I no longer need to worry about how fast radiation gets emitted, because in the dense state it would be absorbed again. That was the idea of the Equilibrium Super.
