A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

3. Thermonuclear Weapons and the Cold War

The building of the vast nuclear military industrial complexes (to use President Eisenhower’s cautionary phrase⁵) occurred during the Cold War. The dominant project was not the atom bomb but the thousand-times-more-powerful thermonuclear fusion weapon – the H-bomb. The Soviet Union and the United States raced to produce a deliverable fusion weapon. The first deliverable weapon test with a fusion element to the blast actually occurred in the Soviet Union with the adoption of Andrei Sakharov and Vitali Ginzburg’s Layer Cake single-stage design in which Lithium Deuteride (for fusion) was layered in with the elements of a fission weapon boosting its yield (Rhodes, 1995). The concept was successfully tested to a 400 kilotonne yield in the “Joe-4” test of 12 August 1953. This, however, was not a two-stage hydrogen bomb with the possibility of a megatonne yield. That required an elegant breakthrough insight from Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller in the United States. The resulting megatonne test of the enormous Mike device predated the Joe-4 test, occurring on 1 November 1952. The first deliverable hydrogen bomb, Castle Bravo, was tested by the US on 1 March 1954. The Ulam–Teller insight is (probably) still not in the public domain today. That, however, has not stopped the publication of the secret of the H-bomb from having a place in the history of the US Constitution. The US Federal Government, for only the second time in its history (the first ...