H-Bomb "Secrets"

H-Bomb 'Secrets'

Many U.S. scientists, including those not connected with military research, are afraid to talk about the hydrogen bomb. They have seen too many colleagues pilloried for discussing "classified information," even though it may have been known for years to all the scientific world.

In its current issue the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, for once feeling no such fears, carries an article which describes in detail and with figures the basic principles of the hydrogen bomb. It tells how the speeding fission fragments of exploding uranium will impart high velocity to light atoms around them, causing them to "fuse," and release enormous amounts of energy.

One reaction discussed by the author uses deuterium (heavy hydrogen) packed into a layer around the uranium detonator. Deuterium atoms, which are given the comparatively low energy of 100,000 electron volts, says the article, will react with each other on collision, turning into helium 3 and a single free neutron. The products fly apart, with a speed equivalent to 3.3 million electron volts.

The author does not think much of this simple "dd reaction." Probably not enough deuterium atoms would collide squarely. The reaction would probably die out before much of the material had a chance to react, and thus the bomb would not be very destructive. It might be much better, says the author, to surround the uranium detonator with lithium hydride. When hydrogen and lithium atoms in this common chemical compound are given sufficient energy, they react with one another, forming two atoms of helium 4. It takes only 100,000 electron volts, says the article, to start the reaction. Each atomic collision yields an enormous amount of energy: 17.3 million electron volts. Thus lithium hydride should give more than twice as much energy per pound as fissioning uranium.

Few U.S. scientists would dare to make such figures public. But the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had run on to an exception. Its article on the H-bomb is a reprint from a book by well-known Austrian Physicist Hans Thirring, who had no access to secret information. The book was published in Vienna, right under the nose of the Russians, in 1946.

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