In a now-famous talk on fusion in 1954, Edward Teller noted that any device with convex magnetic field lines would likely be unstable, a problem today known as the flute instability. The mirror has precisely such a configuration; the magnetic field was highly convex at the ends where the field strength increased.[a] This led to serious concern by Post, but over the next year, his team could find no sign of these problems. In October 1955 he went so far as to state that "it is now becoming clear that in the case of the mirror machine at least these calculations do not apply in detail."

In Russia, the first small-scale mirror ("probkotron") was built in 1959 at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, Russia. They immediately saw the problem Teller had warned about. This led to something of a mystery, as the US teams under Post continued to lack any evidence of such problems. In 1960, Post and Marshall Rosenbluth published a report "providing evidence for the existence of a stability confined plasma... where the simplest hydromagnetic theory predicts instability."