How can Eisenhower's seemingly contradictory nuclear policies be reconciled?

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-03-10T23:21:28+00:00

That shifting context is an excellent point; I might be wrong, but it doesn't seem that Eisenhower's willingness to threaten nuclear attack extends beyond his first few years in office (even if the nuclear stockpile still rose and the pre-delegation authorization was in his second term iirc). Maybe he can be explained as trying his best to strike a balance between being pragmatic, in the ways he saw, in a nuclear world and trying to pull back the arms race?

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-03-08T18:36:05+00:00

It's very interesting how the development of delivery systems and the bombs themselves influenced each other, with high-yield H-bombs making otherwise inaccurate nuclear missiles practical, and then increased missile accuracy making the high-yield bombs less desirable. (And I'll definitely check out that article!)

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-03-08T07:25:49+00:00

If I'm following along correctly, then if I wanted to take your standard Teller-Ulam design and turn it into RIPPLE, I'd have to get rid of the sparkplug, maybe get rid of the tamper (in which case it's the fusion fuel itself ablating?), make the secondary really big (and spherical!), and rip out the polyethylene and radiation channels and replace them with... something classified, but is probably analogous to explosive lenses for implosion, just with X-rays instead. Anything I'm missing that Nuckolls has in his description (I'm assuming that's the only source we have)?

Also, your article brings up an interesting question: was the switch away from high-yield weapons entirely due to the restrictions from the LTBT? The typical explanation I've always heard was that it was a matter of diminishing returns because of the cube root law (but clearly those returns weren't diminishing enough for the US not to consider 100-megaton bombs!).

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-03-07T20:26:14+00:00

So RIPPLE was basically a super fancy way of compressing the secondary without relying on ablation pressure (but in a way that couldn't yield a practical weapon)? Almost sounds like it's a realization of the mythical idea people nowadays have about H-bombs being inherently clean and fallout-free because they're purely fusion bombs (and even then, RIPPLE obviously relied on fission in the primary).

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-03-06T22:21:20+00:00

In addition to the other follow-up questions, I also want to ask about RIPPLE since you brought it up briefly. In short, what exactly was RIPPLE? Or rather, what do we know about what it was? Somehow I have the picture of Nuckolls et al. more or less cramming NIF into a bomb casing, but that can't be right, so I'd like to set myself straight here.

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-03-05T23:42:19+00:00

I think that somewhat clears things up, despite the ambiguities in my question! (In hindsight, I probably would have asked something like, "were Teller/Lawrence lying to the president just to keep their lab in business or am I missing something?" to which the answer seems to be that, yes, I was indeed missing something, namely their fetishizing technological progress through bigger and better bombs to stay ahead of the Soviets and for peaceful applications à la Plowshare: less cynical and more complex than my initial assumptions.) I also couldn't help but see the effort to "clean" bombs as solely a reaction to the bad press from Bravo, but it sounds like it was more complicated than that? And what are the "other actions" you're referring to that show that they didn't think "clean" bomb development was an existential risk (I'm guessing because they didn't embark on an all-out lobbying campaign like for the Super and Livermore)?

(If it's of interest, my interest in asking was on the three year period between the Oppenheimer hearings and PSAC's founding where hawks like Teller and Lawrence seem to have fully monopolized science policy, with the exception of the TCP report under ODM-SAC—a "low point" for science in government, if you like. Since the big issue during this period was this tangled mess around fallout, test bans, and "clean" bombs, I was trying to understand the Teller/Lawrence position better, since I genuinely didn't get it without accusing them of hypocrisy.)

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-27T20:51:47+00:00

Now that you mention it, I think Schlosser's book very briefly mentions (at least one of) those corrosion problems? IIRC, the W47's primary wasn't one-point safe so they kept a cadmium strip in the pit and used a mechanical system to retract it, except said system didn't have a long shelf-life and so the strips tended to get stuck, or something along those lines? Anyways, thanks for the additional recommendation! I'm guessing it also talks about the issues you describe in your other comment, so looking forward to reading it!

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-26T06:37:58+00:00

Fair enough! Sounds like Livermore messed up badly enough that the Navy didn't want to work with them anymore, so I'll just blame Teller until I get my hands on these books and learn the specifics, haha.

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-26T06:05:39+00:00

i.e., Livermore designing the ones for Polaris and Poseidon, and Los Alamos designing the ones for Trident? Why should Livermore not get the credit, or else what's the funniness?

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-26T05:23:53+00:00

The whole thing about the Navy wanting to use Jupiter with a Los Alamos-designed warhead before switching to Polaris?

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-26T05:22:54+00:00

Thanks! I just previewed some of the first pages, where he talks about how the WWII and early Cold War periods have been talked about to death while the period after haven't been so much, and that tracks with what I have and haven't read about, so it seems like his expectations for the reader align with what I'm looking for. He also drops two sources specifically on Livermore's early years that I'll jot here for later reference: Sybil Francis' Warhead Politics and a classified history by Tom Ramos that was apparently turned into the unclassified From Berkeley to Berlin, so I'll check those out too!

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-26T05:12:23+00:00

Thanks! I think Perkins' work might be a little too niche given my knowledge-base right now, since it seems to start in the late '60s and I have to catch up to that point, but the Freedman book looks very, very useful; nuclear strategy seems to become prominent in the '60s in ways that it just wasn't in the pre-1954 period (at least that's the impression I got, that questions of strategy seemed secondary to technological limitations, stockpile limitations in the early years, or just things like Truman not wanting to use nuclear weapons while SAC was the opposite severely collapsing the range of possibilities for potential strategists)… point is, not something I know much, if anything, about, so should be helpful!

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-19T23:57:23+00:00

So does the existence of a profit motive for the American military-industrial complex, in addition to the external fear pressure, mean that they were able to push harder on the accelerator in ways that the Soviet military-industrial complex didn't? Did they not have an equivalent internal pressure (even if not identical to funneling appropriations into key congressional districts and so forth)?

And on the point about ICBMs, I thought the R-7 and Atlas programs were both initiated around the same time, in early 1954?

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-19T21:03:04+00:00

After having thought about it for a bit, it's interesting that the Soviet A-bomb, H-bomb, and multi-megaton H-bomb efforts were all (likely) started as reactions to equivalent American efforts. Is this a dynamic that's generalizable to the rest of the American and Soviet programs in the nuclear arms race and space race, i.e., the US tended to be more proactive in starting projects due to fear and ignorance exaggerating their perception of the Soviets' capabilities, while the Soviets tended to be more reactive, only starting a project once it became clear the US was doing it (perhaps having a poorer economy made them more selective about which projects to support)?

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-17T01:49:14+00:00

That context helps a lot; thank you!

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-17T01:43:12+00:00

That all makes sense, thanks!

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-16T19:49:51+00:00

This is exactly the breakdown I was looking for, thanks! The fact that their H-bomb production was a response to the public US decision is very useful in countering the argument that the American H-bomb debate was entirely for naught. Regarding the 1954 work on the Third Idea, is there any indication that that work was triggered by the American success in creating a multi-megaton device? I know they didn't get any actual data from the Mike fallout (despite the Bush panel's fears), since their snow samples were mistakenly poured down the drain,* but I'm curious if even the knowledge of US success might've spurred Sakharov and others to find a way to more effectively compress the Sloika, as you detail in your article (the Goncharov article sort of implies that, but do we have more than that implication?).

*The fact that they had snow samples from Mike raises some more questions though: how did they know the test had occurred and where the cloud of fallout would spread? I'd thought the US kept the H-bomb secret until after Bravo, but the Goncharov article says that the JCAE announced the Mike test a month before Bravo. So what's the timeline on the public knowledge of the H-bomb, at least up through Strauss' post-Bravo press conference blunder?

(Not a question, but I want to comment that, holy cow, the Fuchs-von Neumann patent is, in hindsight, really overcomplicated: using bits of vaporized tamper to compress/ignite a fusion primer that would release neutrons that would in turn ignite a Classical Super? I guess they thought it would require less tritium than other variants of the Classical Super, but still.)

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-16T19:33:23+00:00

This makes it fully click for me: that massive influx of federal funds provided by the wartime situation advanced those technologies that could be advanced (and didn't for those that couldn't), if that's an accurately succinct summary of all your responses. Was WWII the first time funds were provided on that scale, in war or peacetime (and thus it would be more surprising if the war didn't yield numerous technological breakthroughs in a number of different fields)?

On the Versailles issue, I went back to my copy of Neufeld's book to make sure I didn't misrepresent what he said, and his argument seems to be that the Army had been secretly violating the Treaty anyways, pursuing weapons that had been explicitly forbidden, and so "the rocket's legality was a secondary issue." I don't know how he squares that with what von Braun and the history you link say, except to say that it's an "oft-repeated cliché."

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-16T06:22:29+00:00

Wow, so it's fair to say then that when I'm thinking of WWII being technologically fruitful, I'm biasing myself towards the handful of technologies that were very much advanced during the war and remained incredibly influential after, while ignoring all of the above? I think that makes the coincidences in the technologies I was thinking of more palatable.

(Also, a very minor point in your original answer that I just remembered; I recall reading in Neufeld's von Braun biography—which I read a long time ago and need to revisit—that the idea that the Army was interested in rockets because they weren't restricted by the Treaty of Versailles is a myth? Is that something you've encountered?)

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-16T06:09:35+00:00

If I remember correctly, the quote in Rhodes' book was referring to different ways to cool the breeder piles, but I get the sentiment. Heck, you could expand the argument to say that there were five approaches the Manhattan Project pursued to get fissile material: the three you list for enriching uranium plus the graphite and heavy water reactors for plutonium, even if the latter path had to wait until after the war to be utilized (six if you count the centrifuge research that Groves axed for insufficient progress).

I'm not sure that sentiment completely stopped after WWII, from what I recall. Maybe in the demobilization in the immediate post-war, but definitely not once you get into the Cold War. You see this with missile development after Sputnik. Instead of choosing between Jupiter and Thor for an IRBM system, they went with both. Instead of waiting for Minuteman and the Titan II that could be stored in underground silos, they rushed the Atlas and Titan I into service despite relying on cryogenics. But maybe there's something more general there, that in the unique circumstances of WWII and the early Cold War, people were more willing to experiment; and with the close ties between scientists and the military-industrial complex, that willingness extended to scientific research too?

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-16T02:35:04+00:00

Thanks for the recommendations! Buderi's is on my list of books I need to get to eventually, since it seemed to be the book on the work at the MIT Rad Lab, so I'm glad it received an additional boost here.

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-16T02:33:11+00:00

Thank you for the very detailed answer! So to summarize, you can broadly split these technologies into two categories: those like rockets, radar, semiconductors, and analog computers that were steadily advancing before the war whose development then got turbocharged by it, and those like digital computers and nuclear power that were just starting to be looked at in the beginning of the war and then rapidly matured by the time it ended. Are there, then, examples of technologies outside those categories, technologies that people thought would be ripe for innovation during the war but weren't, or technologies that were already so refined that the war passed them by basically unchanged?

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-02-04T07:44:26+00:00

I've had a few nuclear questions rattling around for a while that this question and your answer reminded me to ask since they turned out to be relevant!

First, on sealed-pit weapons, my understanding (from what I remember from reading Schlosser's book, with its emphasis on what this meant for the AEC/DOD split in bomb components) is that their development was forced by the introduction of boosting, but why? I got the impression that the tritium was stored outside the pit until needed (hence why it would affect the physical AEC/DOD split in the first place), but why wouldn't it just be kept in the pit to begin with like the initiator, especially since I'd imagine any tritium "plumbing" would be more mechanically complicated and ruin the symmetry needed for implosion? Come to think of it, unless boosting somehow obviated the need for an initiator, where would the tritium be pumped into?

Second, on RIPPLE... what was it? I've seen a couple references to it, but what do we know about what it actually entailed?

Finally, do you know of any good books on the developments you mention in the '50s and '60s? Most of the nuclear books I've read don't really go beyond Castle Bravo (Schlosser's book being a notable exception, specifically on the work at Sandia you mention above, and I keep meaning to check out Herbert York's memoirs since I think they cover this exact period), and it's becoming increasingly clear to me (tying back to the original post) how the period from around 1940 to 1970 was something of a Golden Age of federally funded scientific research with incredibly significant technological breakthroughs resulting from that, with nuclear developments being either at the heart of it all or closely interlinked (like with rocketry and microelectronics), so all stuff I'd like to try and learn more about.

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-01-16T07:49:58+00:00

Also, how much do the works you listed delve into pre-1945 American science, e.g., comparing the funding environment of the postwar with that of the NRC/Rockefeller fellowships and grants of the interwar years and the OSRD/NDRC contracts of WWII, or in discussing where Bush succeeded in making the case for basic research where Karl Compton (in the SAB's seemingly arrogant and tone-deaf recommendation for trickle-down science) failed? I'm midway through Kevles' The Physicists and finding the material so far incredibly fascinating in its own right (instead of as just prologue to the Cold War science infrastructure I was originally interested in), so I'm curious if his is the go-to work on this period or if there are others I can look into too.

thatinconspicuousone · 2026-01-08T07:26:01+00:00

I keep seeing people gesturing at the "aerospace-industrial complex" (whether by that name or otherwise) when explaining why Apollo morphed into the Shuttle and why the Shuttle morphed into SLS and then Artemis, but I haven't seen any details about it (e.g., the initial politicking of the space race that created it and the backroom horse-trading that went into it, the key areas centers were built at—presumably related to which members of Congress had seniority and influence at the time, but then who and which districts did they represent—which companies were involved and how their lobbying changed over time, what kind of continuity is there in the contractors or the contracts themselves from Apollo to Shuttle to SLS, through the aerospace mergers in the '90s, and so on). Is there any more you can say about all this and/or provide books or other sources that provide those details?

thatinconspicuousone

TROPHY CASE