THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL INVENTORS OF ALL TIME

7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

war’s end he wanted the U.S. government’s nuclear
weapons development priorities shifted to the hydrogen
bomb. Hiroshima, however, had had a profound effect on
Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists,
and few had the desire to continue in nuclear weapons
research.
Teller accepted a position with the Institute for
Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago in 1946 but
returned to Los Alamos as a consultant for extended
periods. The Soviet Union’s explosion of an atomic bomb
in 1949 made him more determined that the United States
have a hydrogen bomb, but the Atomic Energy
Commission’s general advisory committee, which was
headed by Oppenheimer, voted against a crash program to
develop one. The debate was settled by the confession of
the British atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs that he had been
spying for the Soviet Union since 1942. Fuchs had known
of the American interest in a hydrogen bomb and had
passed along early American data on it to the Soviets. In
response, President Harry Truman ordered the go-ahead
on the weapon, and Teller laboured on at Los Alamos to
make it a reality.
Teller and his colleagues at Los Alamos made little
actual progress in designing a workable thermonuclear
device until early in 1951, when the physicist Stanislaw
Marcin Ulam proposed to use the mechanical shock of an
atomic bomb to compress a second fissile core and make it
explode; the resulting high density would make the burn-
ing of the second core’s thermonuclear fuel much more
efficient. Teller in response suggested that radiation,
rather than mechanical shock, from the atomic bomb’s
explosion be used to compress and ignite the thermo-
nuclear second core. Together these new ideas provided a
firm basis for a fusion weapon, and a device using the