Yet some good comes even of the greatest evil. All the circumstantial evidence points to the fact that during the five-year period following the end of the war our work on the hydrogen bomb had stopped completely. The A-bomb was the mightiest weapon in the world, we seem to have reasoned, and it would take Russia many years before she would get an A-bomb of her own. Why spend great efforts on a superbomb? The shock when Russia exploded her first A-bomb much sooner than we expected, topped by the second shock that Fuchs had handed Moscow all our major secrets on a platter—including, as must be surmised, those of the H-bomb—awakened us to the facts of life. It is no accident that President Truman’s official announcement of the order to build “the so-called hydrogen bomb or superbomb” came within three days of the announcement of Fuchs’s arrest and confession. The President gave his order with full knowledge of Fuchs’s confession, which made it evident that the Russians were already at work on the hydrogen bomb and had probably been working on it uninterruptedly since 1945. The tragic prospect is that instead of the Russians catching up with us, it is we who may have to catch up with them. Five years after the first announcement of the explosion of the A-bomb over Hiroshima, even the most intelligent Americans still have only the vaguest idea about the facts. Yet these facts are within the understanding of the average man. If we keep the earlier analogy of the match in mind, it becomes simple to understand the principles underlying both the A-bomb, now more correctly identified as the “fission bomb,” and the hydrogen bomb, more properly described as the “fusion bomb.” Our principal fuel is coal, which, as everyone knows, is “bottled sunshine,” stored up in plants that grew about two hundred million years ago. When we apply the small amount of heat energy from a match, the bottled energy is released in the form of light and heat, which we can use in a great variety of ways. The point here is that it requires only the application of a very small amount of energy from a match to release a very large amount of energy that has been stored for millions of years in the ancient plants we know as coal. Now, during the past half century we discovered that the nuclei, or centers, of the smallest units of which the ninety-odd elements of the material universe are made up—units we know as atoms—had stored up within them since the beginning of creation amounts of energy millions of times greater than is stored up by the sun in coal. But we had no match with which to start an atomic fire burning.