Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
nytimes.com72 points by LAsteNERD 4 days ago
72 points by LAsteNERD 4 days ago
Incidentally, IEEE Spectrum published a fascinating interview with Dr. Garwin just a few months ago. https://spectrum.ieee.org/richard-garwin
> At IBM, where he worked from 1952 to 1993, Garwin was a key contributor or a facilitator on some of the most important products and breakthroughs of his era, including magnetic resonance imaging, touchscreen monitors, laser printers, and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm. > > And all that was after he did the thing for which he is most famous. At age 23 and at the behest of Edward Teller, Garwin designed the very first working hydrogen bomb...
> "and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm"
Supposedly, at Garwin's scheming, one of the creators wasn't aware the immediate application of the algorithms they were optimizing was nuclear weapons,
> "Tukey reportedly came up with the idea during a meeting of President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee discussing ways to detect nuclear-weapon tests in the Soviet Union by employing seismometers located outside the country. These sensors would generate seismological time series. However, analysis of this data would require fast algorithms for computing DFTs due to the number of sensors and length of time. This task was critical for the ratification of the proposed nuclear test ban so that any violations could be detected without need to visit Soviet facilities.[4][5] Another participant at that meeting, Richard Garwin of IBM, recognized the potential of the method and put Tukey in touch with Cooley. However, Garwin made sure that Cooley did not know the original purpose. Instead, Cooley was told that this was needed to determine periodicities of the spin orientations in a 3-D crystal of helium-3."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooley–Tukey_FFT_algorithm#His...
That application was for detecting nuclear bombs, not making them. That’s a big difference.
I expect at the time the distinction was irrelevant.
I also don't think it's necessary to be critical about the wording above. Perhaps "was related to nuclear weapons" reads better? But it's not exactly ambiguous, especially after reading the quoted passage.
> I expect at the time the distinction was irrelevant.
Detection of nuclear bomb explosions is central to arms control treaties. Those are pretty much the opposite of nuclear weapon creation.
I understand. However, in the climate of the nuclear arms race, I think that all projects having anything to do with nuclear physics were likely to be kept under tight wraps.
The comment I replied to seems to be taking a snarky tone toward a comment that was interesting and furthering the actual topic of the post. By highlighting that it didn't take a stance:
> one of the creators wasn't aware the immediate application of the algorithms they were optimizing was nuclear weapons
Even your reply to me seems to only allow interpreting "application ... was nuclear weapons" to mean "building" or "developing" instead of "detecting" when to me it simply means "in the domain of." And certainly you agree that detection is in the space of nuclear weapons?
The obvious reason detection technology falls under the same secrecy umbrella as weapons design is because one leads quite quickly to the other if you start to think about why it might be developed.
To me at least it would very clearly mean building or developing. “In the domain of” would require explicit clarification.
"Is that fusion in your pocket or are you just trying to determine periodicities of the spin orientations in a 3-D crystal of helium-3?"
> He graduated at 19 and Standard Oil offered him a full ride for graduate study at the University of Chicago, which had one of the nation’s top physics departments.
I think it's fascinating that Garwin was at University of Chicago at the same time as Theodore Hall studied for his masters/Phd in Physics after he left the Manhattan Project. Hall left the university in 1952 for Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City. At exactly that time, an intense counter espionage investigation targeting Hall had been underway for several years.
Hall provided the single most detailed document of the plutonium device to the Russians. They were both child prodigies. Hall was recruited into the Manhattan Project straight out of Harvard when he was 18.
"journalist Dave Lindorff, writing in The Nation on January 4, 2022, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Hall's FBI file in 2021. This 130-page file included communications between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the head of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Gen. Joseph F. Carroll, showing that Carroll had effectively blocked Hoover's intended pursuit of Hall and Sax, probably fearing that Hall's arrest would have, in the political climate of the McCarthy Era, forced the Air Force to furlough and lose their top missile expert, Edward Hall. Carroll, a former top aide to Hoover before he became the first head of the USAF OSI, ultimately allowed Hoover's agents to question Ed Hall on June 12, 1951 (with an OSI officer monitoring the interview). Within several weeks of that session, the Air Force, which had conducted and completed its own investigation into Edward Hall's loyalty (having their own investigators question him four times), promoted him to Lt. Colonel, and later Colonel, and elevated him from assistant director to director of its missile development program. The promotions were a clear slap in the face to Hoover. Ed Hall went on to complete the development of the Minuteman missile program, and then retired."
The quote is confusing, because it's not always clear which Hall brother "Hall" refers to. Edward Hall, who developed the Minuteman missiles, was the brother of Theodore Hall, the spy. After reading the source article: <https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ted-hall-espionage-f...>, I can annotate the quote with first names:
"journalist Dave Lindorff, writing in The Nation on January 4, 2022, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Hall's FBI file in 2021. This 130-page file included communications between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the head of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Gen. Joseph F. Carroll, showing that Carroll had effectively blocked Hoover's intended pursuit of [Theodore] Hall and Sax, probably fearing that [Theodore] Hall's arrest would have, in the political climate of the McCarthy Era, forced the Air Force to furlough and lose their top missile expert, Edward Hall. Carroll, a former top aide to Hoover before he became the first head of the USAF OSI, ultimately allowed Hoover's agents to question Ed Hall on June 12, 1951 (with an OSI officer monitoring the interview). Within several weeks of that session, the Air Force, which had conducted and completed its own investigation into Edward Hall's loyalty (having their own investigators question him four times), promoted him to Lt. Colonel, and later Colonel, and elevated him from assistant director to director of its missile development program. The promotions were a clear slap in the face to Hoover. Ed Hall went on to complete the development of the Minuteman missile program, and then retired."
> One proposed version[^1] had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization.
Except... [^1] https://archive.ph/Md1YG
[^1]https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Were they just wrong by an order of magnitude or 2 because of previously unforseen limits, like air pressure? Or maybe 100MT is not the same as 600k Hiroshimas. Casually, the blast doesn't look like it's has a similar effect.
It’s a reference to this paragraph where they hypothesized about a 10,000MT bomb;
> All of which is to say that the idea of making hydrogen bombs in the hundreds-of-megatons yield range was hardly unusual in the late 1950s. If anything, it was tame compared to the gigaton ambitions of one of the H-bomb’s inventors. It is hard to convey the damage of a gigaton bomb, because at such yields many traditional scaling laws do not work (the bomb blows a hole in the atmosphere, essentially). However, a study from 1963 suggested that, if detonated 28 miles (45 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth, a 10,000-megaton weapon could set fires over an area 500 miles (800 kilometers) in diameter. Which is to say, an area about the size of France.
Teller’s crazy ass wanted to build a 10,000MT bomb with a 1,000MT primary..
Big boom booms are easy.
Nuclear bomb design research since the sixties is all about making them as clean and low yield as possible. These two goals are counters to each other, but once you've mastered it your nuclear arsenal becomes less of a garage queen and a lot more useful.
Your linked site for some reason doesn't include fallout by default, nor does it seem to factor casualties from it. Turn on fallout + surface burst, and a 100MT bomb's deadly fallout range goes from the center of France (where the label is on their map) to the center of Germany and I suspect that's an extreme underestimation, especially the conic they give.
It's also possible that the NYTimes is conflating facts by accident. Your demo link only accounts for single big-blast effects but the way you optimize damage with nukes is lots of smaller bombs, often in a single bomb - MIRV is one name for this. The reason is pretty simple. We approximate the explosive range as a sphere and the volume of that sphere is proportional to the cube (^1/3) of the yield.
So if you increase the yield by 10x you only increase the explosive radius by something like 2.15x. On the other hand, detonate 10 bombs side by side and you increase the radius by 10x. This not only maximizes damage, but also works to further nullify any sort of anti-missile defense. And 100MT would be well more than enough to obliterate France.
You can also kind of intuit this by thinking about 100MT means. That's 100,000,000 TONS of TNT explosive capacity. That's about 1.5 tons of TNT for each and every person in France. That's just a stupidly massive absurd amount of destruction.
> detonate 10 bombs side by side and you increase the radius by 10x
By 10**.5~=3.2x
It’s not very tidy phrasing, but I think the meaning is that 10 detonations next to each other (blast diameters touching) is 10x the diameter?
He's right. You'd want to arrange them in a square for comparable coverage so it'd be sqrt(10) = ~3.2.
It feels somehow nice and correct that an effort to reduce a 3d problem (basically a lot of our boom goes up or down, which is not necessary in most cases) to a 2d one changes it from a gain of x^(1/3) to x^(1/2).
The OP presumably meant a line of blasts though? That would possibly be the least efficient orientation after blasting the same spot 10x.
Depends on your goal, the nature of the target, and how much damage you want to do.
At one extreme there are precision attacks in silos and airfields. At the other are genocide attacks where you want to kill as many people as possible and leave as much of the land uninhabitable for as long as possible.
In the middle are precision strategic attacks, where you want to leave infrastructure and buildings so you have the option to invade and take over.
The fallout from a bomb is going to depend on its design.
In a typical thermonuclear bomb, most of the yield is still from fission, so there are lots of fission products. The purpose of the fusion is to generate neutrons to more thoroughly fission the fissionable material.
However, it's possible to design thermonuclear bombs with greatly reduced fission fraction. The extreme example of that were the Ripple tests, which the US conducted shortly before atmospheric tests were banned. These involve a secondary without a fission "spark plug", where carefully tailored implosion cause the density/temperature at the core of the secondary to reach conditions for fusion ignition, in a way very similar to how inertial confinement fusion reactors are imagined to work. The most extreme of these has been reported to derive 99% of its yield from fusion reactions. If the neutrons from these are absorbed in something with low activation the fallout could be greatly reduced.
Wikipedia says that the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of about 16 kilotons of TNT. 600k of those would be 16*600 megatons, or 9600 megatons. That's 96 times more than the original target yield of 100 megatons for Tsar Bomba.
I don't know if that's possible, but it makes sense that it would "reduce a region the size of France to ashes." Maybe the design had a lot of stages.
IIRC there is no hard limit on the size of a hydrogen bomb. That said many small nukes operating as a cluster cover more area for the same material due to the inverse cubed law.
AFAIK, you can just pack as much fuel as you want into the secondary to scale the size of a thermonuclear bomb. So yeah, there is no size limit. Interesting aside; the US had the dial-a-yield mechanism that allowed one bomb to deliver a selectable amount of energy, not sure what the mechanism for this was, however.
As to your second sentence, pretty sure that’s what a MIRV is.
> not sure what the mechanism for this was, however.
Boosting (injection of deuterium/tritium into the centre of the pit) causes a large increase in yield because fusion generates lots of high energy neutrons that go on to fast fission your (still compressed) pit.
According to one weapons designer, boosting is mainly responsible for the remarkable 100-fold increase in the efficiency of fission weapons since 1945.
Variable yield weapons presumably still exist. Particularly depth charges iirc.
Usually the yield can be selected between two or more fixed levels rather than a continuously variable input. Often this is implemented with tricks such as disabling the secondary and/or disabling boosting in the primary.
I think it's probably referring to this bomb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E55uSCO5D2w
I think the key is proposed weapon, instead of practical weapon. It's a fascinating video, you should check it out!
Teller really, really wanted to build a gigaton bomb. That may have been what the author was thinking of.
He also proposed a 10 gigaton bomb. It was referred to as a “backyard bomb.” Meaning that you didn’t have to figure out how to put it on a missile or bomber. You could just detonate it in your backyard and it would do the job of destroying the enemy (and everyone else).
Richard Garwin was member [0] of Pugwash [1]
He was an active and kind participant in many Pugwash, ISODARCO and Amaldi conferences. From 1982 on, Garwin worked with Gorbatschev’s Science Advisor, Evgeny Velikhov, and other American and Russian scientist on proposals limiting nuclear arsenals and space-based weapons.
[0] https://pugwash.org/2025/05/20/obituary-and-appreciation-for...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugwash_Conferences_on_Science...
In 1995, fifty years after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and forty years after the signing of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, the Pugwash Conferences and Joseph Rotblat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly "for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms."
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