Background:
In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its first atomic device- RDS-1. It was modeled on the Fat Man device dropped on Nagasaki and had a similar yield. While the United States had earlier added more powerful weapons to its stockpile as demonstrated in tests such as Operation Greenhouse, the Soviets acquired the bomb years earlier than expected, and Washington was alarmed that it may lose its preeminence in atomic weapons if it failed to push the envelope and test more powerful bombs.
The RDS-1 test convinced President Truman that it was necessary to develop a hydrogen bomb, where part of the explosive yield would be produced by nuclear fusion.
A fusion device was speculated about as early as the Manhattan Project, but the possibility had never been seriously attempted until this time.
The Project:
Edward Teller, a veteran of the Manhattan Project and the main advocate of the idea of a hydrogen bomb since then, was called in to work on the new project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. What emerged out of all the complicated physics was the Teller-Ulam device- a sort of layered bomb wherein one fission reaction would set off a fusion reaction, followed by another fission reaction.
This was a breakthrough. Not only did it demonstrate that a hydrogen bomb was theoretically possible, but the design also broke free of any limits to a bomb's destructive power. While a classical fission device like the bombs used up to this point had an upper limit in terms of destructive power (the 500 kiloton Ivy King bomb, the second shot in the Operation Ivy series, was the most powerful non-thermonuclear device ever tested), thermonuclear bombs do not have any such limit. In theory, it would be possible to build a hydrogen bomb powerful enough to destroy a planet for instance (though finding enough fissile material to do this would certainly be a problem!). This would be done by adding additional fusion-fission stages to the bomb.
The Device:
Codenamed "Sausage," the Ivy Mike device was not actually designed by Edward Teller himself, but Richard Garwin, on Teller's suggestion. It was massive, weighing 73.8 metric tons and was two-stories tall. Part of the reason for the size of the device was the need for supercooled liquid fuel to induce the fusion reactions.
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| The Sausage device, to the left |
The Shot:
Edward Teller was not present for the final test of his design (as the video above shows). The time scheduled for the detonation was 7:14 A.M. local time. The test was a success. The mushroom cloud reached a maximum height of 36.5 kilometers and had a diameter of 96.5 kilometers (Nuclear Weapon Archive). Ivy Mike vaporized the island it stood on and left a large crater that is still visible today, as seen below:
The estimated yield of the blast was 10.4 megatons- hundreds of times more powerful than any atomic device ever detonated before that point.
As I suspect you've seen by now in the above video, Edward Teller received the news of the successful test not from a telephone, but by using a seismograph. His simple message back to Los Alamos was "It's a boy." This signified that the project to develop a hydrogen bomb was successful.
Aftermath:
The successful detonation of the Sausage device proved that the Teller-Ulam design worked in reality. Ivy Mike however, was far too big to be weaponized. It was merely a rather fiery and spectacular experiment that proved that the hydrogen bomb design was sound. The Soviets derisively called Ivy Mike something like a fusion factory- because that's what it was. Nevertheless, the arms race would now take an even more explosive and dangerous turn. Operation Ivy touched off the next wave of testing to weaponize the hydrogen bomb- Operation Castle, which would produce weapons even more fearsome.
See also:
Making the H-Bomb (more background, including the economic and geopolitical context)
Operation Ivy project film
Operation Ivy at Nuclear Weapon Archive Operation Ivy Mike Thermonuclear Weapon Cold War
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