In 1942, during the U.S. Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb, physicist Edward Teller promoted the idea of using an atomic blast to trigger a thermonuclear reaction that would result in a much bigger explosion. The Project team decided to focus on atomic bombs and not to explore his idea during the war. After the war, there was resistance from some scientists about technical difficulties with Teller’s ideas and other people were reluctant to create such a devastating super bomb that could only be used against large populations of civilians. Teller and his supporters said that it was inevitable that such bombs would be created and the U.S. would be at a strategic disadvantage if we did not have them.
In 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb much earlier of the U.S. expected, U.S. President Harry Truman made the decision to proceed with research on the creation of such a thermonuclear or hydrogen fusion bomb. The exact way to trigger such a fusion reaction had not yet been determined when the project began.
In 1951, a feasibility test for a fusion bomb was conducted in the new U.S. Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshal Islands. A fission bomb in the shape of a donut was exploded with a small amount of liquid heavy hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) in the middle of the donut. The hydrogen fused and created a burst of fast neutrons which caused the U-238 in the bomb to undergo fission. The fusion reaction generated little energy but did prove the principle.
In 1952, a full test of a fusion bomb was conducted at the Pacific Proving Ground. The device was not a deployable bomb. It was a twenty feet tall and weighed over sixty four tons. The explosive yield was equivalent to ten million tons of TNT. The island of Elugelab was destroyed in the blast leaving a crater over a mile wide in the ocean floor. In 1952, less than a year later, the Soviet Union exploded a thermonuclear bomb. It was a relatively small device but it was a deliverable bomb and a powerful propaganda tool.
By 1954, the U.S. had managed to create an actual thermonuclear bomb that could be a deliverable weapon. When it was tested at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the fifteen megaton yield was three times bigger than expected. Poor weather conditions caused a cloud of radioactive fallout to spread over inhabited areas of the Marshall Islands. The affected areas were evacuated and are still uninhabitable. The exposed natives sustained high levels of cancer and birth defects over the following years.
Hydrogen bombs had been advertised as being cleaner than fission bombs because the fusion reaction did not produce the radioactive materials that were produced by a fission bomb. However, the publicity was misleading because a powerful fission reaction was used to trigger the fusion in a hydrogen bomb and that fission reaction did produce large amounts of radioactive fallout. Hydrogen bombs were so powerful that, in addition to the destruction of civilian areas around military targets, huge clouds of fallout could threaten cities and even other countries that were miles away from the blast. Concerns for the welfare of the whole world began to be expressed if the superpowers with thermonuclear bombs went to war with the new weapons.
First United States Thermonuclear Device Test:
