National Security Archive: “A new scientific memoir by one of the few surviving participants in the U.S. H-bomb project provides fresh information and insights into the production of the world’s first thermonuclear device. In an exclusive essay and selection of declassified documents provided to the National Security Archive and posted today on the Archive’s website, the author, Dr. Kenneth W. Ford, brings to light intriguing pieces of the H-bomb’s early history, including personal aspects such as the brittle relationship between physicists Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam and their feud over who came up with one of the central theories leading to the H-bomb’s development. Building the H Bomb, A Personal History (Singapore: World Scientific, 2015) describes a central element of the process — the Princeton University-based “Project Matterhorn” — where Ford and his colleagues used the latest computer technology to calculate the mid and late stages of a thermonuclear explosion, especially the burning of the nuclear fuel. The Matterhorn calculations were essential to the IVY MIKE thermonuclear test that caused the island of Elugelab — part of Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands — to disappear on 1 November 1952. As William Broad reports in The New York Times yesterday, 23 March 2015, Dr. Ford is currently in a dispute with the Department of Energy concerning the latter’s security review of Building the H Bomb. Ford emphasizes that he has scrubbed his book of nuclear weapons secrets and that any and all technical information he uses is from public sources. The DOE reviewers, however, declare that the book includes secret “Restricted Data.” Believing otherwise, Dr. Ford argues that much of the public-record material that he uses comes from people who had “Q” clearances authorizing their access to nuclear weapons data. On the grounds that the DOE arguments are poorly founded, Ford has gone ahead with publication…”