In August 1949 the first successful Soviet test of an atomic bomb, nick-
named "Joe I" after Stalin, ended the American monopoly on nuclear weap-
ons and inaugurated the era of proliferation. The American response was to
launch a crash program to develop an even more fearful thermonuclear, or
hydrogen, weapon based upon the fusing together at extremely high tem-
peratures of light elements, as opposed to the fission of heavy ones. Al-
though the idea of a fusion weapon had been broached by the Hungarian
physicist Edward Teller in 1942, relatively little work had been done.

Despite opposition by Oppenheimer and the General Advisory Com-
mittee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Truman decided to approve the
development of the new weapon upon the advice of his military advisers.
The achievement of a successful hydrogen bomb did not occur until 1954,
due less to the opposition of Oppenheimer than to technical and design
errors of Teller and the complexity of the fusion process, which required
coupling by x-rays of the primary and secondary parts of the weapon. Whereas
the early atomic bombs had a yield of approximately twenty kilotons of TNT
equivalent, the hydrogen bomb yield immediately reached the fifteen mega-
ton range; the largest weapon was exploded in 1961 by the Soviet Union,
with a yield of nearly sixty megatons.

On the development of the hydrogen bomb, see Herbert York, The
Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller and the Superbomb ( San Francisco: W. H.
Freeman, 1976), which includes the previously classified General Advisory
Committee report. More recently the 1954 history of the hydrogen bomb
project by Hans Bethe has been published in the Los Alamos Science (Fall
1982) as "Comments on the History of the H-Bomb."In 1979 a journalist
named Howard Morland attempted to publish a description of the hydrogen

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