would slow as the devices improved and temperatures were pressed higher. Calculations demonstrated that the resulting maximum temperatures while staying within q > 1 would be limited to the low millions of degrees. Artsimovich had been quick to point this out in Novosibirsk, stating that future progress would require new heating methods to be developed. US turmoil One of the people attending the Novosibirsk meeting in 1968 was Amasa Stone Bishop, one of the leaders of the US fusion program. One of the few other devices to show clear evidence of beating the Bohm limit at that time was the multipole concept. Both Lawrence Livermore and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), home of Spitzer's stellarator, were building variations on the multipole design. While moderately successful on their own, T-3 greatly outperformed either machine. Bishop was concerned that the multipoles were redundant and thought the US should consider a tokamak of its own. When he raised the issue at a December 1968 meeting, directors of the labs refused to consider it. Melvin B. Gottlieb of Princeton was exasperated, asking "Do you think that this committee can out-think the scientists?" With the major labs demanding they control their own research, one lab found itself left out. Oak Ridge had originally entered the fusion field with studies for reactor fueling systems, but branched out into a mirror program of their own. By the mid-1960s, their DCX designs were running out of ideas, offering nothing that the similar program at the more prestigious and politically powerful Livermore didn't. This made them highly receptive to new concepts. After a considerable internal debate, Herman Postma formed a small group in early 1969 to consider the tokamak. They came up with a new design, later christened Ormak, that had several novel features. Primary among them was the way the external field was created in a single large copper block, fed power from a large transformer below the torus. This was as opposed to traditional designs that used magnet windings on the outside. They felt the single block would produce a much more uniform field. It would also have the advantage of allowing the torus to have a smaller major radius, lacking the need to route cables through the donut hole, leading to a lower aspect ratio, which the Soviets had already suggested would produce better results. Tokamak race in the US In early 1969, Artsimovich visited