"Barnaby Finch" wrote in message
...
On 6/1/04 9:47 PM, in article ,
"JASON A. KAATZ" wrote:

History may judge Teller correct about the wisdom of acquiring the Super
before the Russians did,

The current draft of history seems not to do so.

It conforms to contentions made publicly by a former Teller protege, Herbert
York, that following Oppenheimer and the GACs advice would not harmed U.S.
security at all and probably would have enhanced it. In the 1970s York
pointed out that if the U.S. had not gone ahead with testing the hydrogen
bomb,and had just retained it untested as a backup, and simply outfitted
its bomber force with 500 kt fission bombs, the US would have retained
overwhelming dominance over the USSR.

This is because the U.S. had a tremendous advantage in :
1) delivery capability, and
2) uranium enrichment, and
3) the U.S. had a viable bomb concept that it could get ready to test and
leave on the shelf as a contingency

Even if the USSR had gone ahead and perfected the hydrogen bomb on its own,
the U.S. would have picked up the test and could have taken its own design
off the shelf, tested it, and still beaten the USSR into having significant
deployment.

And the most recent evidence shows that without U.S. testing, the USSR would
have come up with the hydrogen bomb much, much later that it did. The 1952
Mike test alerted the USSR to a the existence of an important new design
concept, but they still didn't crack the nut until the second U.S. test
series in 1954 which provided additional stimulus.

but he was not above some duplicity.

It is interesting reading this accounts of his relationship with
Oppenheimer, and his involvement with the security hearings (see not only
his Memoirs, but an much earlier article "Seven Hours of Reminiscences" in
Los Alamos Science, Winter/Spring 1983) in which he entirely omits mention
of his documented collaboration with the FBI, and which contradicts his
accounts of his testimony in the hearing.