Over a period of six months, Morland systematically pieced together a design for a hydrogen bomb. He visited a number of nuclear weapons facilities and interviewed government employees, with the permission of the DOE, usually identifying himself and his purpose. He did not have a security clearance, and had never had any access to classified nuclear weapons documents, although it is possible that some classified information or ideas were accidentally or deliberately leaked to him. His scientific background was minimal; he had taken five undergraduate courses in physics and chemistry as part of his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics at Emory University. Morland identified the features of the Teller–Ulam design as staging, with a fission primary and a fusion secondary inside opposite ends of a hollow container, and the use of radiation from the exploding primary to compress, or implode, the secondary. "The notion that X-rays could move solid objects with the force of thousands of tons of dynamite," noted Morland, "was beyond the grasp of the science fiction writers of the time."