Knowing the Enemy, Anticipating the Threat

摘要

In a way, Lawrence Livermore was founded as a result of the nation's not knowing―or at least, underestimating―"the enemy." In August 1949, U.S. reconnaissance planes detected radioactive debris near Japan, proof that the Soviets had detonated an atomic bomb. In Memoirs, physicist Edward Teller writes, "Until the fall of 1949, our intelligence community, most of the leading scientists, and general public opinion held that the Soviet Union could not develop an atomic bomb before the 1960s." Within days. Ernest O. Lawrence, Nobel laureate and head of the University of California's Radiation Laboratory, met with federal officials to press for a strong hydrogen bomb effort to hold the Soviets in check. Teller, a leading theorist on the hydrogen bomb, also pushed for a vigorous U.S. hydrogen bomb project. The surprise of the Soviet atomic test and the looming threat of a Soviet hydrogen bomb spurred the creation of a branch of Lawrence's Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in Livermore as a second U.S. weapons laboratory.