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departure left Los Alamos without a head of theory, the very post that Teller coveted, and Teller was offered the job. But Teller would only accept if the lab would devote its resources to developing better bombs—most likely a fusion weapon. Alas, the lab was to turn its attention to production rather than to designing fusion weapons. “There was no backing for the thermonuclear work. No one was interested in developing a thermonuclear bomb,” huffed Teller. “No one cared.”
    Los Alamos was dissolving around him, and few Manhattan Project scientists seemed interested in developing the fusion bomb. Teller decided to pack his bags and move back to the University of Chicago. His relationship with Los Alamos wasn’t over, however. He would consult for the laboratory during the postwar years, and he would soon return to the New Mexico complex.
    Teller’s dream of unlimited power was just a little premature. In just a few years, the United States would embark on a crash effort to develop fusion weapons.
     
     
    The decision to build fusion weapons came from paranoia and fear. Even though the Americans had a monopoly on nuclear bombs, there was the nagging worry that the Soviets would soon build their own atomic weapons. Once that happened, Teller reasoned, they would certainly invade—unless America had an even bigger weapon in its arsenal: the Super. “Edward offered to bet me that unless we went ahead with his Super,” wrote a colleague, “he, Teller, would be a Russian prisoner of war in the United States within five years!”
    Just after the war ended, Teller tried to get the Super program started again. At a conference in April 1946, Teller and two dozen key scientists met to discuss whether a superbomb was feasible, and if so, what its future should be. There is some debate as to what the conference participants actually concluded, but the report was sanguine: “It is likely that a super-bomb can be constructed and will work,” it said, adding that if doubts about the design proved to be true, “simple modifications of the design will render the model feasible.” The report reflected Teller’s unflagging optimism. (After all, he wrote the thing.) He was promising that fusion was within reach.
    In truth, though, the road to the superbomb would be harder than Teller imagined. Not only was his design flawed, but he also had to overcome political opposition. Oppenheimer and his cronies were trying to get the United States to give up its monopoly on atom bombs—by giving nuclear secrets to the Communists. To Teller, it was madness; it was almost treasonous.
    In March 1946, the month before Teller’s Super conference, Oppenheimer and a government committee made the radical suggestion that “inherently dangerous” activities such as mining uranium should be put under international control and that all nations, including the Soviet Union, should have access to nuclear knowledge. As idealistic as this scheme might seem, at least in retrospect, it became official U.S. policy within a few months. The United States’ representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, Bernard Baruch, presented such a plan to the United Nations. It was “a choice between the quick and the dead,” he told the world. “We must elect world peace or world destruction.” Not all nations agreed with that simplistic dichotomy. The Soviet Union opposed the proposal, and by the end of 1946 the plan was dead. It soon became clear why.
    On September 3, 1949, a modified B-29 bomber flying off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula picked up alarming traces of radiation. It was the first sign of a radioactive cloud that soon drifted across the Pacific, the United States, and Canada before crossing the Atlantic and circling the world. Physicists around the United States scrambled to figure out the source of the radiation. It did not take long. The radioactive cloud had elements that showed that it was the result of nuclear fissions. It was