Much of Ford 's work was concerned with writing programs and doing calculations related to thermonuclear burning , first using human " computers " with desk calculators , then IBM card-programmed calculators ( CPCs ) , and later , with Project Matterhorn , the SEAC computer at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington , DC . A SEAC calculation , programmed by Ford with the assistance of John Toll and the guidance of John Wheeler , provided the final predicted yield of 7 megatons for the Mike test on November 1 , 1952 . The actual yield was approximately 10 megatons . " I was aware of the fact that Oppenheimer was expressing opposition to the development of the H-bomb , for various reasons , from technical to moral . But I was also an accidental participant in what may have been the critical moment in changing his point of view . In June of '51 there was a meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission actually a broader gathering that included the GAC meeting at the Institute for Advanced Study . They were meeting in a first floor room on , if I remember correctly , a Sunday morning . Maybe it was a Saturday morning . It was a weekend . It was Sunday , June 17 . Wheeler was scheduled to make a presentation on the latest results of our calculations on the CPC in New York . I was working every night , all night , that week prior to that meeting trying to get the latest and best results that we could . " The night prior to this meeting at the Institute for Advanced Study , I took a morning train down from New York with the latest results , went over to the Matterhorn building , got out a very large piece of paper , maybe about two feet by three feet in size , a large rectangle of paper , and sketched out a graph showing our latest calculation of thermonuclear burning , still very crude of course , because of those calculations , yet extremely encouraging . I then rolled up this large graph and drove over to the Institute and walked up to the first-floor window of the room where the meeting was in progress and either rapped gently on the window or signaled through the window to catch Wheeler 's attention . As it happened , Wheeler had just taken the floor . It had just become his turn to speak . He interrupted his speech , walked over to the window , opened it , took from me this large graph , carried it back and pasted it on the blackboard for all to see . And then , at that moment , according to the reports of those who were there , Oppenheimer suddenly decided , ' This does look encouraging . I think they 've really got something . It looks like it 's going to work after all . ' " In the fall of 1952 , Ford left project Matterhorn and spent the next six months completing his graduate dissertation on the collective model of the nucleus . After defending his dissertation in the spring of 1953 , and after spending that summer working in Los Alamos , he took up a post-doctoral research appointment at Indiana University , beginning that fall
Mike test
Ivy Mike
Kenneth W. Ford