Today in 1952, Los Alamos theoretical physicist and weapons designer Ted Taylor used a parabolic mirror and a 15-kt nuclear explosion (George) detonated atop a 300-ft tower in Nevada to light a Pall Mall cigarette. Taylor designed the lightweight “Scorpion” device for the test.
Taylor (1925-2004) subsequently recalled that he “carefully extinguished the cigarette and saved it for a while in my desk drawer at Los Alamos. Sometime, probably in a state of excitement about some new kind of bomb, I must have smoked it by mistake.”
Taylor went on to design the highest- and lowest-yield US atomic (fission) bombs: the B18 (500 kt, tested above Enewetak Atoll in Shot King on November 15, 1952), and the W54 (.018-.022 kt, tested at the Nevada Proving Ground in Little Feller II and I on July 7 and 11, 1962).
Taylor spent much of his career obsessively pursuing even smaller atomic bombs: “What is the absolute lower limit to the total weight of a complete fission explosive. What is the smallest amount of plutonium or uranium 235 that can be made to explode?”
“I tried to find out what was the smallest bomb you could produce, and it was a lot smaller than Davy Crockett [the W54 warhead] ... . It was a full implosion bomb that you could hold in one hand that was about six inches in diameter.” Quotes are from George Dyson’s 2002 book.
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