After receiving security clearance in December 1941, Bethe joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he invented the Bethe-hole directional coupler, which is used in microwave waveguides such as those used in radar sets. In Chicago in June 1942, and then in July at the University of California, Berkeley, he participated in a series of meetings at the invitation of Robert Oppenheimer, which discussed the first designs for the atomic bomb. They went over the preliminary calculations by Robert Serber, Stan Frankel, and others, and discussed the possibilities of using uranium-235 and plutonium. (Teller then raised the prospect of a thermonuclear device, Teller's "Super" bomb. At one point Teller asked if the nitrogen in the atmosphere could be set alight. It fell to Bethe and Emil Konopinski to perform the calculations demonstrating the virtual impossibility of such an occurrence.) "The fission bomb had to be done," he later recalled, "because the Germans were presumably doing it."