A report on Thermonuclear weapon and Stanislaw Ulam

One possible version of the Teller–Ulam configuration

Operation Castle thermonuclear test, Castle Romeo shot

The Scottish Café's building now houses the Universal Bank in Lviv, Ukraine.

Operation Grapple on Christmas Island was the first British hydrogen bomb test.

One of France's Triomphant-class nuclear-armed submarines, the Téméraire (S617)

Ivy Mike, the first full test of the Teller–Ulam design (a staged fusion bomb), with a yield of 10.4 megatons on 1 November 1952

Photographs of warhead casings, such as this one of the W80 nuclear warhead, allow for some speculation as to the relative size and shapes of the primaries and secondaries in U.S. thermonuclear weapons.

The Sausage device of Mike nuclear test (yield 10.4 Mt) on Enewetak Atoll. The test was part of the Operation Ivy. The Sausage was the first true H-Bomb ever tested, meaning the first thermonuclear device built upon the Teller-Ulam principles of staged radiation implosion.

An artist's conception of the NASA reference design for the Project Orion spacecraft powered by nuclear propulsion

When the positive integers are arrayed along the Ulam spiral, prime numbers, represented by dots, tend to collect along diagonal lines.

An animation demonstrating the lucky number sieve. The numbers in red are lucky numbers

He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion.

- Stanislaw Ulam

The design of all modern thermonuclear weapons in the United States is known as the Teller–Ulam configuration for its two chief contributors, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, who developed it in 1951 for the United States, with certain concepts developed with the contribution of physicist John von Neumann.

- Thermonuclear weapon

6 related topics with Alpha

Edward Teller

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Physicists at a Manhattan District-sponsored colloquium at Los Alamos on the Super in April 1946. In the front row are (left to right) Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J. M. B. Kellogg. Robert Oppenheimer, in dark coat, is behind Manley; to Oppenheimer's left is Richard Feynman. The Army officer on the left is Colonel Oliver Haywood.

The Teller–Ulam design kept the fission and fusion fuel physically separated from one another, and used X-rays from the primary device "reflected" off the surrounding casing to compress the secondary.

The 10.4 Mt "Ivy Mike" shot of 1952 appeared to vindicate Teller's long-time advocacy for the hydrogen bomb.

Teller testified about J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1954.

One of the Chariot schemes involved chaining five thermonuclear devices to create the artificial harbor.

Teller became a major lobbying force of the Strategic Defense Initiative to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Appearing on British television discussion After Dark in 1987

Edward Teller (Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the Teller–Ulam design), although he did not care for the title, considering it to be in poor taste.

It included Stanislaw Ulam, Jane Roberg, Geoffrey Chew, Harold and Mary Argo, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer.

Manhattan Project

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Research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons.

Enrico Fermi, John R. Dunning, and Dana P. Mitchell in front of the cyclotron in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University

March 1940 meeting at Berkeley, California: Ernest O. Lawrence, Arthur H. Compton, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Karl T. Compton, and Alfred L. Loomis

Different fission bomb assembly methods explored during the July 1942 conference

Manhattan Project Organization Chart, 1 May 1946

Oppenheimer and Groves at the remains of the Trinity test in September 1945, two months after the test blast and just after the end of World War II. The white overshoes prevented fallout from sticking to the soles of their shoes.

Groves confers with James Chadwick, the head of the British Mission.

Shift change at the Y-12 uranium enrichment facility at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on 11 August 1945. By May 1945, 82,000 people were employed at the Clinton Engineer Works. Photograph by the Manhattan District photographer Ed Westcott.

Physicists at a Manhattan District-sponsored colloquium at the Los Alamos Laboratory on the Super in April 1946. In the front row are Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J. (Jerome) M. B. Kellogg (1905-1981). Robert Oppenheimer, in dark coat, is behind Manley; to Oppenheimer's left is Richard Feynman. The Army officer on the left is Colonel Oliver Haywood.

Map of Los Alamos site, New Mexico, 1943–45

Hanford workers collect their paychecks at the Western Union office.

The majority of the uranium used in the Manhattan Project came from the Shinkolobwe mine in Belgian Congo.

Oak Ridge hosted several uranium separation technologies. The Y-12 electromagnetic separation plant is in the upper right. The K-25 and K-27 gaseous diffusion plants are in the lower left, near the S-50 thermal diffusion plant. The X-10 was for plutonium production.

Calutron Girls were young women who monitored calutron control panels at Y-12. Gladys Owens, seated in the foreground, was unaware of what she had been involved in.

The S-50 plant is the dark building to the upper left behind the Oak Ridge powerhouse (with smoke stacks).

Workers load uranium slugs into the X-10 Graphite Reactor.

Aerial view of Hanford B-Reactor site, June 1944

Map of the Hanford Site. Railroads flank the plants to the north and south. Reactors are the three northernmost red squares, along the Columbia River. The separation plants are the lower two red squares from the grouping south of the reactors. The bottom red square is the 300 area.

A row of Thin Man casings. Fat Man casings are visible in the background.

Remote handling of a kilocurie source of radiolanthanum for a RaLa Experiment at Los Alamos

The explosives of "the gadget" were raised to the top of the tower for the final assembly.

The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.

Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., speaks to service personnel Oak Ridge Tennessee in August 1945.

A billboard encouraging secrecy among Oak Ridge workers

Security poster, warning office workers to close drawers and put documents in safes when not being used

Allied soldiers dismantle the German experimental nuclear reactor at Haigerloch.

Silverplate B-29 Straight Flush. The tail code of the 444th Bombardment Group is painted on for security reasons.

Little Boy explodes over Hiroshima, Japan, 6 August 1945 (left);
Fat Man explodes over Nagasaki, Japan, 9 August 1945 (right).

Presentation of the Army–Navy "E" Award at Los Alamos on 16 October 1945. Standing, left to right: J. Robert Oppenheimer, unidentified, unidentified, Kenneth Nichols, Leslie Groves, Robert Gordon Sproul, William Sterling Parsons.

President Harry S. Truman signs the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, establishing the United States Atomic Energy Commission.

The Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW) near Niagara Falls became a principal repository for Manhattan Project waste for the Eastern United States. All of the radioactive materials stored at the LOOW site—including thorium, uranium, and the world's largest concentration of radium-226—were buried in an "Interim Waste Containment Structure" (in the foreground) in 1991.

A "bomb" (pressure vessel) containing uranium halide and sacrificial metal, probably magnesium, being lowered into a furnace

After the reaction, the interior of a bomb coated with remnant slag

A uranium metal "biscuit" from the reduction reaction

Edward Teller pushed for discussion of a more powerful bomb: the "super", now usually referred to as a "hydrogen bomb", which would use the explosive force of a detonating fission bomb to ignite a nuclear fusion reaction in deuterium and tritium.

At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Stanislaw Ulam gave one of his students, Joan Hinton, an exam early, so she could leave to do war work.

The first nuclear explosive devices, cumbersome and inefficient, provided the basic design building blocks of all future weapons. Pictured is the Gadget device being prepared for the first nuclear test, Trinity.

Nuclear weapon design

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A fourth type, pure fusion weapons, are a theoretical possibility.

Flash X-Ray images of the converging shock waves formed during a test of the high explosive lens system.

Ivy Mike, the first two-stage thermonuclear detonation, 10.4 megatons, November 1, 1952.

Bassoon, the prototype for a 9.3-megaton clean bomb or a 25-megaton dirty bomb. Dirty version shown here, before its 1956 test. The two attachments on the left are light pipes; see below for elaboration.

Subsidence Craters at Yucca Flat, Nevada Test Site.

A diagram of the Green Grass warhead's steel ball safety device, shown left, filled (safe) and right, empty (live). The steel balls were emptied into a hopper underneath the aircraft before flight, and could be re-inserted using a funnel by rotating the bomb on its trolley and raising the hopper.

staged thermonuclear weapons are essentially arrangements of two or more "stages", most usually two. The first stage is normally a boosted fission weapon as above (except for the earliest thermonuclear weapons, which used a pure fission weapon instead). Its detonation causes it to shine intensely with x-radiation, which illuminates and implodes the second stage filled with a large quantity of fusion fuel. This sets in motion a sequence of events which results in a thermonuclear, or fusion, burn. This process affords potential yields up to hundreds of times those of fission weapons.

The design breakthrough came in January 1951, when Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam invented radiation implosion – for nearly three decades known publicly only as the Teller-Ulam H-bomb secret.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

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American theoretical physicist.

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes' Laboratory in Leiden, Netherlands, 1926. Oppenheimer is in the middle row, second from the left.

The University of California, Berkeley, where Oppenheimer taught from 1929 to 1943

Physicists Albert Einstein and Oppenheimer conferring circa 1950

Oppenheimer's ID badge from the Los Alamos Laboratory

Presentation of the Army-Navy "E" Award at Los Alamos on October 16, 1945. Oppenheimer (left) gave his farewell speech as director on this occasion. Robert Gordon Sproul right, in suit, accepted the award on behalf of the University of California from Leslie Groves (center).

A group of physicists at the 1946 Los Alamos colloquium on the Super. In the front row are Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J.M.B. Kellogg. Behind Manley is Oppenheimer (wearing jacket and tie), and to his left is Richard Feynman. The army colonel on the far left is Oliver Haywood. In the third row between Haywood and Oppenheimer is Edward Teller.

The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project was the first detonation of a nuclear device.

Oppenheimer's Van Gogh, Enclosed Field with Rising Sun (1889).

Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey

Oppenheimer in 1946 with his trademark cigarette

President Dwight D. Eisenhower receives a report from Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, on the Operation Castle hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific, March 30, 1954. Strauss pressed for Oppenheimer's security clearance to be revoked.

Oppenheimer's former colleague, physicist Edward Teller, testified on behalf of the government at Oppenheimer's security hearing in 1954.

Oppenheimer Beach, in Saint John, U.S. Virgin Islands

Award of honorary degrees at Harvard to Oppenheimer (left), George C. Marshall (third from left) and Omar N. Bradley (fifth from left). The President of Harvard University, James B. Conant, sits between Marshall and Bradley. June 5, 1947

Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves in September 1945 at the remains of the Trinity test in New Mexico. The white canvas overshoes prevented fallout from sticking to the soles of their shoes.

J. Robert Oppenheimer giving a speech during a 1966 visit to Israel

He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb during a 1949–1950 governmental debate on the question and subsequently took stances on defense-related issues that provoked the ire of some factions in the U.S. government and military.

In 1951, Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed what became known as the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb.

John von Neumann

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Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath.

Von Neumann's birthplace, at 16 Báthory Street, Budapest. Since 1968, it has housed the John von Neumann Computer Society.

Excerpt from the university calendars for 1928 and 1928/29 of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin announcing Neumann's lectures on the theory of functions II, axiomatic set theory and mathematical logic, the mathematical colloquium, review of recent work in quantum mechanics, special functions of mathematical physics and Hilbert's proof theory. He also lectured on the theory of relativity, set theory, integral equations and analysis of infinitely many variables.

History of approaches that led to NBG set theory

Flow chart from von Neumann's "Planning and coding of problems for an electronic computing instrument," published in 1947.

The first implementation of von Neumann's self-reproducing universal constructor. Three generations of machine are shown: the second has nearly finished constructing the third. The lines running to the right are the tapes of genetic instructions, which are copied along with the body of the machines.

A simple configuration in von Neumann's cellular automaton. A binary signal is passed repeatedly around the blue wire loop, using excited and quiescent ordinary transmission states. A confluent cell duplicates the signal onto a length of red wire consisting of special transmission states. The signal passes down this wire and constructs a new cell at the end. This particular signal (1011) codes for an east-directed special transmission state, thus extending the red wire by one cell each time. During construction, the new cell passes through several sensitised states, directed by the binary sequence.

Von Neumann's wartime Los Alamos ID badge photo

Operation Redwing nuclear test in July 1956

The von Neumann crater, on the far side of the Moon.

During World War II, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project with theoretical physicist Edward Teller, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and others, problem-solving key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb.

Von Neumann continued unperturbed in his work and became, along with Edward Teller, one of those who sustained the hydrogen bomb project.

Ivy Mike, the first full test of the Teller–Ulam design (a staged fusion bomb), with a yield of 10.4 megatons (November 1, 1952)

History of the Teller–Ulam design

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Physicist Edward Teller was for many years the chief force lobbying for research into developing fusion weapons.

Ivy King, the largest pure fission bomb tested by the US, yielding 500 kt (November 16, 1952)

A view of the Sausage device casing, with its diagnostic and cryogenic equipment attached. The long pipes would receive the first bits of radiation from the primary and secondary ("Teller light") just before the device fully detonated.

The dry-fuel device detonated in the "Castle Bravo" shot demonstrated that the Teller–Ulam design could be made deployable, but also that the final fission stage created large amounts of nuclear fallout.

Like the Bravo test, Castle Romeo "ran away," producing a much higher yield than originally estimated (11 megatons instead of 4), making it the third largest test ever conducted by the US. The Romeo "shrimp" device derived its lithium deuteride from natural instead of "enriched" lithium.

Fireball of the Tsar Bomba (RDS-220), the largest weapon ever detonated (1961). Dropped from over 10 km and detonated at 4 km high, its fireball would have touched the ground were it not for the shock wave from the explosion reflecting off the ground and striking the bottom of the fireball, and nearly reached as high as the altitude of the deploying Tu-95 bomber. The RDS-220 test demonstrated how "staging" could be used to develop arbitrarily powerful weapons.

This article chronicles the history and origins of the Teller–Ulam design, the technical concept behind modern thermonuclear weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs.

In 1951, after still many years of fruitless labor on the "Super", a breakthrough idea from the Polish émigré mathematician Stanislaw Ulam was seized upon by Teller and developed into the first workable design for a megaton-range hydrogen bomb.