How much tritium would it take to make an H-bomb 1,000 times the power of the wartime model A-bombs? Since tritium has about 2.5 times the power per given weight of U-235 or plutonium, it would take 400 kilograms (about 1,880 quarts of the liquid form) of tritium to make a bomb that would equal the power of 1,000 kilograms of plutonium. Such a bomb, we can see, would have to be made at the sacrifice of 32,000 kilograms of plutonium. In other words, we would be getting a return, in terms of energy content, of 1,000 kilograms for an investment of 32,000. And we would be losing fully half of even this small return every twelve years. How many A-bombs would we be sacrificing through this investment? On the basis of Professor Oliphant’s estimate that the critical mass of an A-bomb is between 10 and 30 kilograms, we would sacrifice at least 1,066, and possibly as many as 3,200, if we take the lower figure. And we must not forget that a bomb a thousand times the power will produce only ten times the destructiveness by blast and thirty times the damage by fire of an A-bomb of the old-fashioned variety. These cold facts make it clear that a tritium bomb, particularly one a thousand times the power of the A-bomb, is completely out of the picture. But, one may ask, if a deuterium bomb is not possible and a tritium bomb is not feasible, and these are the only two substances that can possibly be used at all, isn’t all this talk about a superbomb sheer moonshine? And if so, how explain President Truman’s directive “to continue” work on it? To find the answer let us go back for a moment to Dr. Bacher’s man in the mountains, confronted with the problem of lighting a fire with green, ice-covered wood at twenty degrees below zero with “very little kindling.” Obviously the poor fellow would be doomed to freeze to death were it not for one little item he had almost forgotten. Somewhere in his belongings he discovers a container filled with gasoline, which increases the inflammability of the wet wood to the point at which it will catch fire with a quantity of kindling that would otherwise be much too small. Something closely analogous is true with the H-bomb. It so happens that a mixture of deuterium and tritium is the most highly inflammable atomic fuel on earth. It yields 3.5 times the energy of deuterium and about twice the energy of tritium when they are burned individually. Most important of all, the deuterium-tritium mixture, known as D-T, ignites much faster than either deuterium or tritium by themselves. For example, the D-T combination ignites 25 times faster than deuterium alone at a temperature of 100,000,000 degrees, and the ignition time is fully 37.5 times faster than for deuterium at 150,000,000 degrees.