At Los Alamos in 1944, the Hungarian-American physicist Edward
Teller was tasked with performing a critical calculation required for the
construction of the atomic bomb...
It had been realized earlier by Los Alamos scientists
Seth Neddermeyer, von Neumann and Teller that the assembly of the bomb could best
be done by utilizing implosion. That is, the fissile material could be arranged
in a spherical shell, and at the time of detonation, collapsed to a central core
of high density via a spherical implosion. In this way, the critical mass could
be successfully achieved without allowing it to pre-detonate.
The problem then, was to calculate the arrangement of the explosive
materials and the resulting spherical shock wave. Since Teller was one of the originators
of the idea, Bethe, who was Teller's boss, asked him
to do the calculation. Teller, however, had no interest in performing the calculation
-- his real interest was the design of the hydrogen bomb, or "the Super", as it
was called. Besides, Teller's forte was the synthesis of brilliant ideas,
and not so much brute calculation, and he felt others were more capable of doing
the task.
To the annoyance of Bethe, who was eagerly waiting on the result,
he procrastinated on the calculations, and even walked out of a meeting of Los Alamos
section leaders, refusing to do the calculations. Bethe notified Oppenheimer,
who had been put in charge of the Los Alamos project by General Groves, and Oppeneheimer
in turn wrote a letter to the general, asking to replace Teller with
Rudulph Pierls.
Perhaps many of the Los Alamos scientists assumed simply that Teller
would be dismissed from Los Alamos, but to the great credit of Oppenheimer, he kept
Teller at Los Alamos and allowed him to work on the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer even
allocated Teller one hour per week to discuss whatever he wanted. So, from 1942
until 1951, Teller worked on the hydrogen bomb. The breakthrough came when Stanislaw
Ulam in 1951 devised a new method for compressing and igniting the h-bomb fuel.
When Ulam explained his idea to Teller, Teller supplied the necessary insight and
modification to make the Ulam design practical. The "Mike"
was detonated on November 1, 1952 and it successfully verified the Teller-Ulam design.