~ weapons by conventional means bu 10 mack, Jr., received these proposals from. context “booster” refers to a synergistic the advice of the AEC’s scientific experts on them. Other AEC division tests of the booster principle. (In this process in which the explosion of a com- paratively large massoffissionable fuel, say plutonium or uranium 235, causes a comparatively small mass of thermo- nuclear fuel, say deuterium and trit- ium, to burn violently. The high-energy neutrons produced in the thermonuclear process then react back onthe fission explosion, boosting, or accelerating, it to a higher efficiency than would otherwise be the case.) The booster concept had been known for several years, and even before the Russian test it had been agreed to include full-scale experimen- heads weresimilarly studying proposals for expanding the relevant programs within their jurisdiction. At the sametime Teller, then at Los Alamos, Emest O. Lawrence, Luis W. Alvarez and Wendell M. Latimerat the University of California at Berkeley, Robert LeBaron at the Department of Defense, Senator Brien McMahon, Chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, his staf chief William L. Borden and Commissioner Lewis L. Strauss of the AEC had all come to focus on the superbomb as the main element of the answer to the Russian atomic bomb, and they initiated a con- certed effort to bring the entire Covemment around to their point of view as quickly as possible. A’ a result of all this concern and activity the AEC called for a special meeting of its General Advisory Committee to be held as soon as possible. This committee was one of the special mechanisms established by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 for the purpose of managing the postwar development of nuclear energy in the U.S. Its function was to provide the AEC with scientific and technical advice concerningits programs. The members of the committee wereall men who had beenscientific or technological leaders in major wartime projects. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was elected chairman of the committee, ey Stattord Warren DOE/UCLA tal test of the process in a 1951 nucleartest series. The AEC’s Director of Military Application, General James McCor- the Los Alamos laboratory and sought FIRST SUPERBOMB TEST in which a large thermonuclear, or fusion, explosion was successfully ignited by a comparatively small fission explosion took place at the Eniwetok Proving Ground in the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952 (local time). The device, with the code name Mike, released an amount of energy equivalent to that released by the explogion of 10 megatons, or 10 million tons, of TNT, As had been predicted five years earlier by the scientist members of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, yield of first saperbomb was approximately 1,000 times larger than theyield of the first atomic, or all-fission, bombs. 107