In the years following the end of World War
II, the United States gradually found itself confronting
a new enemy: the Soviet Union. At the outset of the Cold War, as
the new period of international tension was called, the United
States had a single, gigantic advantage, since it maintained a
nuclear monopoly. As long as the United States had the bomb and
the Soviets did not, there could be no question as to which country
was the world's number one superpower.
Oppenheimer had originally argued that the United States should
tell its Soviet allies about the bomb project during the war, partly
in the hopes of avoiding a future arms race. But the government
rejected this idea, choosing instead to keep the bomb program a
secret and eventually relishing their nuclear superiority.
But as the physicists knew, there was no big secret to
nuclear power, only some fundamental physical principles and a
large number of technical problems to figure out. This meant that
it was only a matter of time before the Soviets were able to construct
their own atomic bomb. Estimates of how long this would take varied;
some argued it would take the Soviets ten years, others suggested
it might only be four or five. It seems, however, that no one was
listening to their warnings, for when the Soviet Union set off
a nuclear explosion in September of 1949, the United States was
taken by complete surprise.
The country was shocked, and the always-cautious government assumed
that this must mean there had been Soviet spies within Los Alamos.
Oppenheimer, once again, became a prime target of suspicion. But
as investigators tried to determine exactly how the Soviet bomb
program had gotten its information, government officials were scrambling
to decide on an appropriate American response to the new Soviet
nuclear threat.
One suggestion set off a year's worth of top-secret debate
and controversy among the highest levels of the government, military, and
scientific community. It was the suggestion that the only way to appropriate
way to react to the Soviets getting the bomb was to one-up them
by developing what scientists liked to call "the Super," or, more
technically, a hydrogen bomb.
After the war, physicist Edward Teller had stayed at Los
Alamos, working with a team on a new type of bomb, the hydrogen
bomb, which would generate energy by fusing together hydrogen atoms. Such
a bomb would be hundreds of times more powerful than the ones dropped
on Japan. While a hydrogen bomb was theoretically possible, there
was still some question as to whether the physicists could actually
build one.
