Episode Details

In July 1954, Edward Teller walked into a meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee and proposed the largest weapon ever conceived: Sundial, a 10,000-megaton bomb fused by a 1,000-megaton primary called Gnomon. Isidor Rabi called it an advertising stunt. Livermore kept working on it anyway, planning a prototype test during Operation Redwing in 1956 that never happened. This episode digs into what Sundial actually was, why the staged Teller-Ulam design put no theoretical ceiling on yield, and why blast physics — which scales with the cube root of yield — made every step up the ladder a worse deal than the last. Featuring Fermi's verdict on Teller, a Los Alamos blackboard that listed "Backyard" as a delivery method, and the Mark 41, the largest weapon the US ever actually fielded. Key sources: • Wikipedia, Sundial (weapon) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial • Alex Wellerstein, An Unearthly Spectacle: The untold story of the world's biggest nuclear bomb, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2021-10-29 — https://thebulletin.org/2021/11/the-untold-story-of-the-worlds-biggest-nuclear-bomb/ • Alex Wellerstein, In Search of a Bigger Boom, Restricted Data blog, 2012-09-12 — https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bigger-boom/ Episode 5798 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5798 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/500580)