Project Sundial: Teller's 10-Gigaton Doomsday Proposal

My Weird Prompts · Oct 9, 2026 · 28m

In July 1954, Edward Teller walked into a meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee and proposed the largest weapon ever conceived: Sundial, a 10,000-megaton bomb fused by a 1,000-megaton primary called Gnomon. Isidor Rabi called it an advertising stunt. Livermore kept working on it anyway, planning a prototype test during Operation Redwing in 1956 that never happened. This episode digs into what Sundial actually was, why the staged Teller-Ulam design put no theoretical ceiling on yield, and why blast physics — which scales with the cube root of yield — made every…