Follow the money. Project Sherwood was the AEC code name for U.S. controlled-fusion research while it was still classified (roughly 1951–1958). After Geneva 1958 it lost the name and became the AEC Controlled Thermonuclear Research program. It did not produce a working power reactor. It did invent the three magnetic-confinement families still being built. Why the name Paul McDaniel (AEC) shifted leftover money from MIT’s Hood Lab / Project Lincoln to James Tuck’s Los Alamos pinch work. Thomas Johnson’s line: “robbing Hood to pay Friar Tuck… so call it Project Sherwood.” Lewis Strauss (AEC chair) treated it as a crash program. After he left in 1958 it was knocked back to basic research. The four shops 1. Princeton — Project Matterhorn S (Lyman Spitzer) Stellarator: twist the bottle (figure-8, then racetrack + helical windings) so field lines don’t close on themselves and dump plasma. Models A → B → C. Goal was steady operation, not a pulse. 1954 paper study of a “Model D”: ~500 ft long, 5,000 MW electric, $209/kW on paper. Never built. Instabilities and impurity influx killed the early machines. Model C later converted to a tokamak (1969). 2. Los Alamos — James Tuck Pinches. Current through the plasma makes its own B field and squeezes the column — the “pinch.” Machines: Perhapsatron (toroidal), Columbus (straight fast pinch). The 1958 film’s line about compressing “as by a magnetic piston” is this family (Columbus / later Scylla theta-pinch). 1958: Scylla I produced the first neutrons whose spectrum looked thermonuclear (~15 million °C, microseconds). Many earlier neutron claims (including some British ZETA headlines) were instability beams, not a thermal plasma. 3. Livermore — Richard F. Post Magnetic mirrors: solenoid plus stronger coils at the ends. Particles bounce. Machines: Table Top, Toy Top, later Felix, pyrotron line. Geneva 1958: hot-electron plasma held between mirrors for about a millisecond on Table Top; Toy Top made a hot mirror-confined plasma. End-loss was the unsolved leak. That line later became TMX and the huge MFTF, cancelled in 1986 the day it was finished. 4. Oak Ridge — injection Don’t start from cold gas; fire a fast ion beam into a mirror and trap it. DCX (Direct Current Experiment) from 1956. Charge exchange and “burnout” were the problems. Same machine family you see in the long 1958 film. Smaller: NYU theory, Berkeley linear pinches (Baker) that made neutrons later shown to be instability-driven, rotating-plasma / homopolar work, early Astron ideas (Christofilos). What they thought the physics was Three jobs: 1. Get to tens of keV (hundreds of millions of °C). 2. Hold it with B long enough that a useful fraction fuses (n\tau product). 3. Take the energy out. “Controlled” meant not a bomb — isolate the plasma from walls. Every concept hit MHD instabilities (kink, sausage, interchange) and, on open systems, end loss. Stabilizing a pinch with an internal axial field plus a conducting wall helped for microseconds, then created new loss channels. That is what the 1958 films are describing, not hiding. Declassification Classified because of overlap with H-bomb plasma physics and because Strauss wanted a U.S. lead. UK ZETA publicity and Soviet work forced the issue. Weekend before the 2nd UN Atoms for Peace conference (Geneva, Sept 1958), U.S. and UK opened the books. Soviets followed. Amasa S. Bishop, who had run the AEC CTR branch, published Project Sherwood: The U.S. Program in Controlled Fusion (Addison-Wesley, 1958) as the official public brief. Free scan: archive.org/details/bishop_p… @AshtonForbes @Gt5Skier @GabrielCLDiasX @zpfTechnologies @HeeyOcean @KimA2518