Can someone explain the feared runaway nuclear reaction that Oppenheimer presented Einstein in the film? The one where detonating a nuke would’ve exploded the whole world?
Wouldn’t that scenario require many orders of magnitude more energy than the output of the what the first (or current) nuclear weapons were capable of?
In: Physics
As I recall the story, Edward Teller had already started researching how to start a fusion reaction to make a bomb, combining hydrogen to get helium and a lot of energy. He figured that the most likely way to get enough energy to start a fusion reaction was to use a fission reaction, which is what was being developed for the Manhattan Project. In doing his rudimentary calculations, he saw that there was a chance that the atomic bombs being designed would have enough energy to start a fusion reaction, which may continue to fuse all of the hydrogen in the atmosphere making earth a big fireball.
In the movie (and perhaps real life), Oppenheimer had Hans Bethe check the number, since Bethe had a lot of experience with fusion in stellar processes. It was determined that the probability of incinerating the earth was vanishingly small.
It should be noted that Teller continued to advocate for fusion bombs, which eventually were made and were detonated with fission bombs. The fission bombs were usually called atomic bombs and the fusion bombs were called hydrogen bombs.
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