That we have decided to complete the construction of the H-bomb in the shortest possible time was made clear on July 7, two weeks following the Communist attack on South Korea, when President Truman asked Congress to furnish $260,000,000 in cash “to build additional and more efficient plants and related facilities” for materials that can be used either for weapons or for fuels potentially useful for power purposes. The appropriation, he said, was required “in furtherance of my directive of January 31, 1950,” in which he had ordered the Atomic Energy Commission “to continue its work on the so-called hydrogen bomb”; and this was further clarified in a letter to the President by the Budget Director, Frederick J. Lawton, recommending the money request, to the effect that the materials to be produced in the proposed plants could be used for either atomic bombs or hydrogen bombs. Since the only type of plant that could produce materials for both the A-bomb and the H-bomb is a nuclear reactor for producing plutonium, and since tritium is the only H-bomb element that could be produced in a plutonium plant, the request by the President may be interpreted as the first, though indirect, official confirmation that tritium is looked upon as one of the ingredients necessary for a successful H-bomb. We were given a hint of a possible time-table when it was revealed that the all-cash request would have to be obligated in one year though its actual disbursal could be spread over four years. This suggests the possibility that the nuclear reactors for the large-scale production of tritium might be rushed to completion within one year. While these new reactors for the production of tritium are being built, we can convert all our Hanford reactors for that purpose so that no time need be lost. Whatever amounts of plutonium would have to be sacrificed by diverting the Hanford plants from plutonium to tritium would be offset by the new uranium concentration plants at Oak Ridge, and by the fact that we already have a large stockpile of both U-235 and plutonium accumulated over a period of five years.