Sudden Zeus

In a quiet, warehouselike building at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, N. Mex. are six racks of shelves, each 28 ft. long, 3 ft. wide and 20 ft. high. Each rack has seven shelves; on each shelf are 48 grey metal boxes; and the whole thing looks as passive as a shoe factory's inventory. Actually, it is the first half of the Zeus capacitor, one of the world's most violent bits of equipment.

Zeus's job is to store electricity gradually, as in a huge storage tank, and then spit it out as a short but enormously powerful jolt of energy. And Zeus is dangerous, a fact well known to every one of the electricians who swarm over it. The least of Zeus's bolts could burn them to a crisp. When Dr. Tom Putnam, physicist in charge, gets ready to ask Zeus to hurl a trial thunderbolt, he takes elaborate precautions. First he locks the monster in its room. Then he starts the "permissive chain" on the control board.

A warning horn wails. Then comes a 30-second delay during which a trapped electrician could hit one of the nine handy scram switches and stop further action. Putnam presses a button, and direct current from a roomful of transformers and rectifier tubes flows into Zeus.

Last week Putnam was testing a single shelf containing 48 of Zeus's designed 4,032 capacitors. It fired, producing only a loud "blonk" as its energy discharged through a heavy aluminum cylinder called "the load" and dissipated as harmless magnetism.

But if allowed to discharge as an open spark, this single shelf alone produces the electrical jolt of a smallish natural flash of lightning. When Zeus is finished and all its capacitors fire in unison, they will have roughly 100 times as much power. The discharge will flow for only a few microseconds. But while it flows, it will have twice the current of all the electric power generated on earth.

Zeus's thunderbolts are designed to help the U.S. effort (Project Sherwood) to harness the vast thermonuclear energy of the hydrogen bomb in a manageable form. Most promising way to achieve fusion of hydrogen atoms is to squeeze them between enormously powerful magnetic fields, and such fields can only be created by equally powerful currents. When Zeus has passed its last tests, probably some time in June, Project Sherwood's apparatus will be waiting for its thunderbolts. The hope is that they can squeeze hydrogen hard enough to produce a flash of fusion energy.

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