Talk:Sundial (weapon)

Military history: Technology / North America / United States / Cold War

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Some additional sourcing is still needed

@MrPersonHumanGuy: I am not going to draftify this just yet, but I think some additional work is needed on it still. Some statements do not provide references, and seem to largely copy the Kurzgesagt video that brought the spotlight onto this topic. I'll do a bit of cleanup now if I can. TornadoLGS (talk) 03:09, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I might have to track down additional sources to expand the background. Currently a number of the articles we have covering the history of nuclear weapons are inadequately sourced, or use books as sources, which I do not have immediate access to for verification. Especially given the role Edward Teller played in advocating for the development of Gnomon and Sundial, a few important points would be:

Teller advocated for the development of a thermonuclear "super" before the Manhattan Project even officially started.
He continued this advocacy after WWII but didn't gain much support until after the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949.
The first fusion tests were of fusion boosting, rather than true thermonuclear weapons during Operation Greenhouse in 1951.
The first hydrogen bomb was Ivy Mike, tested in 1952, but it was not a deliverable weapon.
The first deliverable thermonuclear weapons came out of Operation Castle in 1954.
The Teller-Ulam design can conceivably be escalated up to any arbitrarily high yield.

From here, this would naturally lead in to Sundial itself, which Teller proposed not long after Operation Castle. We'd need to find and verify the necessary sources for all of this, though. TornadoLGS (talk) 20:22, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]