DO YOU KNOW WHO INVENTED THE HYDROGEN BOMB?

But first, it looks like these two wars show signs of someday reaching a conclusion:

• It has been 692 days since the Hamas attacked Israel.  Finally, Hamas offered a 60-day cease fire proposal.  Israel is considering what to do.
• Since Russia's current invasion of Ukraine 908 days ago, apparently Donald Trump's peace-seeking efforts appear to be working.  The White House today announced that Putin has agreed to meet with Zelenskyy.

To continue my nostalgic series on war and peace, I return to a familiar topic for most.  Last week I wrote about a bomb no one has yet invented, the anti-matter bomb.   Watch this video.  Today, the Hydrogen Bomb.

Say you were on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and this question appears:  Who invented the Hydrogen Bomb?

• Edward Teller.
• Andrei Sakhrov.
• J. Robert Oppenheimer.
• Richard Garwin.

Most would say Teller, with some leaning towards Andrei Sakharov, for he is considered to be the Father of the Soviet H-Bomb.  In 1988, Teller to the left and Sakharov to the right.  Many, from the film, would know that Oppenheimer was involved with the Atomic Bomb, which uses uranium/plutonium, not isotopes of hydrogen.  Actually, the H-Bomb uses an A-Bomb for the initial explosion to trigger deuterium and tritium for the more powerful explosion.

No one knows Richard L. Garwin, but he is the genius scientist who Teller assigned to design the H-Bomb.

• He was born in Cleveland in 1928....and passed away in May at the age of 97.

• 
  He first went to Case Institute of Technology in 1947, and two years later at the age of 21, obtained a PhD in physics from the University of Chicago.

• 
  His doctoral advisor, Enrico Fermi (above), called Garwin "the only true genius he had ever met."  Then again, another student of Fermi, Marvin Goldberger, might have been the one to say this.  In any case, Garwin was incredibly brilliant.  To quote:

By any measure, Richard Garwin is one of the most decorated and successful engineers of the 20th century. The IEEE Life Fellow has won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, France’s La Grande Médaillede l’Académie des Sciences, and is one of just a handful of people elected to all three U.S. National Academies: Engineering, Science, and Medicine. 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.  I could add that he helped develop the first spy satellites, was granted 47 patents and published over 500 papers.

• 
  In any case, in 1951, at the age of 23, he was assigned by Edward Teller to use a conservative design to prove that the concept of a hydrogen bomb was feasible.

• 
  You'd think this would take a decade, but Garwin's device, referred to as "the Sausage," was detonated in a test code-named Ivy Mike at Enewetak Atoll in November of 1952, yielding 10.4 megatons of TNT, 46 time more powerful than George, then the largest A-Bomb detonated.

• 
  There is the well-known theory-based framework, the Teller-Ulam configuration, but Teller discounts the role of Stanislaw Ulam in the final design of the first H-Bomb.

• 
  Garwin then joined IBM's Watson Laboratory in December of 1952 and worked there until he retired in 1993.  Google AI Overview reported:

At IBM, physicist Richard Garwin contributed significantly to foundational technologies like superconducting computers, silicon integrated circuits, and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm. His work also led to early versions of laser printers, touchscreens, eye-tracking technology, and was crucial to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines.

• 
  Then what did he do for 23 years until his death?
• From 1993 to 2001, chaired the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisor Board of the U.S. State Department.
• Also served on 28 National Academies committees.  He is one of small number people elected to all three of them:  Engineering, Science, and Medicine.
• In 2017, science journalist Joel N. Shurkin published a biography of Garwin, True Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin, in which Shurkin writes about "the most influential scientist you never heard of."^[15][16]

• 
  After suffering a heart attack in 1979, Edward Teller recorded an oral testimony about the H-Bomb project, which he kept secret for 22 years.  Incidentally, that photo to the right is Teller in 1994 standing next to a mock-up of the Tsar Bomba, the largest H-Bomb exploded, five times more powerful than Garwin's Ivy Mike.
• Thus, the public did not know about Richard Garwin until 2001, more than half a century after his original design of the Hydrogen Bomb.

• 
  The definitive history of this bomb, Richard Rhode's 1995 Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, only had a page about Garwin, but did not explicitly state that he was the sole designer.  The book emphasizes the larger historical, political and scientific context of the Cold War and arms race.
• By 2003, Teller, Ulam, Hans Bethe and Enrico Fermi had passed away.
• Seven years ago, Garwin was interviewed on his life and the H-Bomb.  54 minutes long.
• Want another video of 54 minutes?  Watch The Man Who Created the Hydrogen Bomb.
• In 2024 IEEE Spectrum spoke via videoconference with Garwin:

• Returning to Los Alamos to work on the hydrogen bomb
• What it’s like to hold plutonium
• Designing “the Sausage”
• His proudest contributions during his time at IBM
• His friendship with Enrico Fermi
• Whether he considers himself an engineer or a physicist
• His efforts in the nuclear arms-control movement
• The future of nuclear and renewable energy

To conclude my nostalgic series on war and peace, next week I will delve into the latter.

So how is Hurricane Erin doing?  Now a Category 3, she might yet strengthen into a 4, but keep away from the U.S.  There will be considerable surf, especially into North Carolina.

Trundling along behind Hurricane Erin is Invest 99L, to become Hurricane Fernand.

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