THEORETICAL PHYSICIST HYDROGEN BOMB PHOTO EDWARD TELLER VINTAGE 1970 For Sale
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THEORETICAL PHYSICIST HYDROGEN BOMB PHOTO EDWARD TELLER VINTAGE 1970:
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EDWARD TELLER FATHER OF HYDROGEN BOMB VINTAGE ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH ORIGINALLY FROM SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINEREdward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the Teller–Ulam design), although he did not care for the title, and was only part of a team who developed the technology. Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and for his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality.Edward Teller, who was present at the creation of the first nuclear weapons and who grew even more famous for defending them, died yesterday at his home on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif., according to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which Dr. Teller once headed. He was 95.
Physicist for Nuclear Age
Few, if any, physicists of this century have generated such heated debate as Edward Teller. Much of it centered on his decade-long effort to produce the hydrogen bomb, his ardent promotion of nuclear weapons in general, his deep suspicion of Soviet intentions and his opposition to curtailment of nuclear testing.
His frustrations in seeking to win support for development of the hydrogen bomb led to his testimony that helped deprive J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the development of the first atomic bomb, of his security clearance. The result in much of the scientific community was a backlash against Dr. Teller that clouded the rest of his life.
Nevertheless, he continued to exert important influence on government policy.
While many colleagues did not share Dr. Teller's political views, to some scientists his was a voice of realism crying out in a wilderness of liberal naÛveté. But Dr. Teller's critics were as impassioned as his supporters. During the Vietnam War, Dr. Teller was the target of unrelenting vilification from antiwar activists. He was seen as the model for Dr. Strangelove, the motion picture character with an artifical arm who ''loved the bomb'' and spoke with a Central European accent.
Dr. Teller's English, though fluent and eloquent, revealed his Hungarian roots, and he had an artificial replacement for the foot he lost in 1928 as a student when he jumped from a moving Munich streetcar.
Edward Teller was born in Budapest on Jan. 15, 1908, the son of Max Teller, a lawyer, and Ilona Deutsch Teller, an accomplished pianist.
Unlock more free articles.Create an account or log inAs an infant Dr. Teller, like Einstein, was slow to begin speaking, but as he developed he displayed amazing mathematical ability. When he told his father that he wanted to study mathematics, his father discouraged him, saying that he would not be able to make a living as a mathematician. In a compromise, young Teller agreed to study chemistry, but he later said that he ''cheated'' by studying mathematics too.
When he was about 20, a new subject captured his imagination. He began to hear of advances in atomic theory and ''a whole new world'' opened up to him, he later said in an interview.
After receiving his doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1930, he joined the faculty of the University of Göttingen, where he remained until 1933. But it became clear that, as a Jew, he would have to leave Nazi Germany. He joined the faculty of George Washington University as a physics professor in 1935 and became a United States citizen six years later.
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‘I Feel Like I Have Five Jobs’: Moms Navigate the PandemicThe idea for a hydrogen bomb, based on the fusion of atoms, apparently originated with Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist, in 1941, a year before Dr. Fermi's team achieved the first fission chain reaction at the University of Chicago, opening the way for developing the atomic bomb.
The energy of the atomic bomb derives from the splitting of very large atoms like uranium or plutonium. In contrast, the hydrogen bomb depends on the fusion of various forms of hydrogen atoms.
In 1941, a few weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while Dr. Teller had a temporary appointment at Columbia University, Dr. Fermi suggested at lunch that an atomic bomb explosion might create conditions sufficiently close to those inside a star to induce the fusion of heavy hydrogen (deuterium) nuclei, releasing an enormous burst of energy.
At first Dr. Teller doubted that fusion could be induced in this way. Nevertheless, when Dr. Oppenheimer called a meeting of top physicists a year later at the University of California in Berkeley, Dr. Teller proposed that they consider building a hydrogen bomb.
When the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory was secretly set up in 1943 to develop an atomic bomb, Dr. Teller, by then at the University of Chicago, agreed to give up pure research and join the project.
Early in 1943 Dr. Teller boarded a train for Los Alamos with his wife, the former Augusta Maria Harkanyi, who died in 2000, and their son, Paul, born only six weeks earlier. His hope, to design a hydrogen bomb, or ''super''' led to early friction with Dr. Oppenheimer, the laboratory's director, who insisted that they concentrate on the atomic bomb, which, in any case, would be needed to ignite the hydrogen bomb.
The situation, after the first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated in 1949, considerably sooner than expected, changed drastically. Teller saw in the hydrogen bomb the one hope for survival and his warnings of a Soviet menace began to reach receptive ears.
While many -- probably most -- scientists opposed the H-bomb, Dr. Teller had the support of such distinguished figures as Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence and Dr. Luis W. Alvarez at the University of California, both later Nobel Prize winners.
In addition to Lewis L. Strauss, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission who became a strong ally of Dr. Teller, Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and others worked to persuade President Truman to press forward with the hydrogen bomb. On Jan. 31, 1950, Truman announced that he had directed the Atomic Energy Commission ''to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super bomb.'' It was a major victory for Dr. Teller.
Teller then pressed for creation of a laboratory, independent of Los Alamos, that would focus on the hydrogen bomb. The proposal was rejected by Dr. Oppenheimer's General Advisory Committee, adding to Dr. Teller's resentment. He was able, however, to persuade his friends in the Pentagon -- ultimately in a meeting with Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett -- of the merits of his proposal and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory came into being east of San Francisco Bay. Dr. Teller served as its director from 1958 to 1960.
The first American fusion, or ''thermonuclear,'' explosion occurred at Eniwetok Island in the Pacific on Nov. 1, 1952. The device was a cumbersome assemblage weighing 65 tons. The Soviet Union achieved such an explosion three years later.
The hearings on Dr. Oppenheimer were held in 1954 after J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, received a long letter from William Liscum Borden, a member of Senator McMahon's staff, explaining why he believed Dr. Oppenheimer was an agent of the Soviet Union.
The accusation led President Eisenhower to order the Atomic Energy Commission to review whether Dr. Oppenheimer's security clearance should be revoked. Hearings were held by the commission's Personnel Security Board, which asked Dr. Teller to appear.
Asked if he considered Dr. Oppenheimer disloyal to the United States, Dr. Teller said no. He was then asked whether he regarded him as a security risk. He replied that he often found Dr. Oppenheimer's actions ''hard to understand.''
''I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated,'' Dr. Teller told the panel.
A large part of the scientific community, dismayed at the witch-hunting of the McCarthy era, aware of long-standing friction between Dr. Teller and Dr. Oppenheimer, and loyal to the leader of the original atomic bomb project, turned its back on Dr. Teller. ''By old friends we were practically ostracized,'' he reported later. His wife ''was very badly hurt'' and became ill.
In contrast to his negative testimony in 1954 Teller in the 1980's was warm in his praise of Oppenheimer. ''He knew how to organized, cajole, humor, soothe feelings -- how to deal powerfully without seeming to do so. He was an exemplary of dedication, a hero who never lost his humanness. Los Alamos' amazing success grew out of the brilliance, enthusiasm and charisma with which Oppenheimer led it.''
Dr. Teller continued to be highly regarded in many quarters and his role as scientific leader and adviser to those in high places increased. After the first Soviet Sputnik was launched in 1957 he was featured on the cover of Time magazine as a symbol of American scientific vigor.
On July 23, President Bush presented Dr. Teller with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian award.
In addition to his son, Dr. Teller is survived by a daughter, Wendy.
While, unlike many atomic scientists, Dr. Teller did not argue against dropping the bomb on Japanese cities, he repeatedly said afterward that doing so had been a mistake. Far better, he maintained, would have been to fire a bomb in the evening high enough above Tokyo to spare the city but to flood it in blinding light.
''If we could have ended the war by showing the power of science without killing a single person,'' he said, ''all of us would now be happier, more reasonable and much more safe.''
Edward Teller (1908-2003) was a Hungarian-born American theoretical physicist. He is considered one of the fathers of the hydrogen bomb.
Teller, along with Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, helped urge President Roosevelt to develop an atomic bomb program in the United States. Teller joined the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1943 as group leader in the Theoretical Physics Division. Teller became interested in the possibility of developing a hydrogen bomb after Enrico Fermi suggested that a weapon based on nuclear fission could be used to set off an even larger nuclear fusion reaction. Teller continued to push his ideas for a fusion weapon throughout the project despite physicists' skepticism that such a device could ever work.
When Hans Bethe was selected as Director of the Theoretical Division, Teller became frustrated and refused to enagage in calculations for the implosion mechanism of the fission bomb. This caused tensions with other physicists at Los Alamos, as additional scientists had to be employed to do that work--including Klaus Fuchs, who was later revealed to be a Soviet spy.
Teller was one of the few scientists to actually watch (with eye protection) the detonation of the Gadget during the Trinity Test in July 1945, rather than follow orders to lie on the ground with his back turned.
In 1954, Teller testified against J. Robert Oppenheimer at his security clearance hearing. He was a major proponent of investigating non-military uses for nuclear explosives, and visited Israel often as their main advisor on nuclear matters.
SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTIONSEdward Teller is often referred to as the "father of the hydrogen bomb." After the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, Teller worked to convince President Truman to develop a crash program for the hydrogen bomb, which he believed was feasible. In 1950, Truman approved the hydrogen bomb program, and Teller returned to Los Alamos later that year to begin working on a design.
Teller collaborated with Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and came up with the first workable design for a thermonuclear device in 1951. A year later, the United States tested it first ever thermonuclear device at Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific. The Mike Shot, as it was known, yielded 10 megatons of TNT and was roughly 1000 times larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima seven years earlier. The design, which came to be known as the Teller-Ulam design, still remains classified.Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the Teller–Ulam design), although he did not care for the title, and was only part of a team who developed the technology.[1] Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and for his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality.
Teller was born in Hungary in 1908, and emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, one of the many so-called "Martians", a group of prominent Hungarian scientist emigrés. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (in particular the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry.[2]
Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, along with Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, and his wife Augusta Teller, Teller co-authored a paper that is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics.[3]
Teller was an early member of the Manhattan Project, charged with developing the first atomic bomb, and proposed the solid pit implosion design which was successful. He made a serious push to develop the first fusion-based weapons as well, but these were deferred until after World War II. He did not sign the Szilard petition, which sought to have the bombs detonated as a demonstration, but not on a city, but later agreed that Szilard was right, and the bombs should not have been dropped on a defenceless civilian population. He was a co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and was both its director and associate director for many years.
After his controversial negative testimony in the Oppenheimer security hearing convened against his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller was ostracized by much of the scientific community.
He continued, however, to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. In his later years, Teller became especially known for his advocacy of controversial technological solutions to both military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using thermonuclear explosive in what was called Project Chariot, and Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
Teller's contributions to science garnered him numerous awards, including the Enrico Fermi Award and Albert Einstein Award. He died on September 9, 2003, in Stanford, California, at 95.Contents1 Early life and work2 Manhattan Project2.1 Los Alamos Laboratory2.2 Decision to drop the bombs3 Hydrogen bomb4 Oppenheimer controversy5 US government work and political advocacy6 Global climate change7 Operation Plowshare and Project Chariot8 Nuclear technology and Israel9 Three Mile Island10 Strategic Defense Initiative11 Asteroid impact avoidance12 Death and legacy13 Bibliography14 See also15 References15.1 Citations15.2 Sources16 Further reading17 External linksEarly life and workEde Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family. His parents were Ilona, a pianist, and Max Teller, an attorney.[4] He was educated at the Fasori Lutheran Gymnasium, then in the Minta (Model) Gymnasium in Budapest. Jewish of origin, later in life Teller became an agnostic Jew. "Religion was not an issue in my family", he later wrote, "indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years."[5] Like Einstein and Feynman, Teller was a late talker. He developed the ability to speak later than most children, but became very interested in numbers, and would calculate large numbers in his head for fun.[6]Teller in his youthTeller left Hungary for Germany in 1926, partly due to the discriminatory numerus clausus rule under Miklós Horthy's regime. The political climate and revolutions in Hungary during his youth instilled a lingering animosity for both Communism and Fascism in Teller.[7]
From 1926 to 1928, Teller studied mathematics and chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe, where he graduated with a degree in chemical engineering. He has stated that the person who was responsible for him becoming a physicist is Herman Mark, who was a visiting professor,[8] after hearing lectures on molecular spectroscopy where Mark made it clear to him that it was new ideas in physics that were radically changing the frontier of chemistry.[9] Mark was an expert in polymer chemistry, a field which is essential to understanding biochemistry, and Mark taught him about the leading breakthroughs in quantum physics made by Louis de Broglie, among others. It was this exposure which he had gotten from Mark's lectures which is what motivated Teller to switch to physics.[10] After informing his father of his intent to switch, his father was so concerned that he traveled to visit him and speak with his professors at the school. While a degree in chemical engineering was a sure path to a well-paying job at chemical companies, there was not such a clear-cut route for a career with a degree in physics. He was not privvy to the discussions his father had with his professors, but the result was that he got his father's permission to become a physicist.[11]
Teller then attended the University of Munich where he studied physics under Arnold Sommerfeld. On July 14, 1928, while still a young student in Munich, he was taking a streetcar to catch a train for a hike in the nearby Alps and decided to jump off while it was still moving. He fell, and the wheel severed most of his right foot. For the rest of his life, he walked with a permanent limp, and on occasion he wore a prosthetic foot.[12][13] The painkillers he was taking were interfering with his thinking, so he decided to stop taking them, instead using his willpower to deal with the pain, including use of the placebo effect where he would convince himself that he had taken painkillers while drinking only water.[14] Werner Heisenberg said that it was the hardiness of Teller's spirit, rather than stoicism, that allowed him to cope so well with the accident.[15]
In 1929, Teller switched to the University of Leipzig where in 1930, he received his Ph.D. in physics under Heisenberg. Teller's dissertation dealt with one of the first accurate quantum mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecular ion. That year, he befriended Russian physicists George Gamow and Lev Landau. Teller's lifelong friendship with a Czech physicist, George Placzek, was also very important for his scientific and philosophical development. It was Placzek who arranged a summer stay in Rome with Enrico Fermi in 1932, thus orienting Teller's scientific career in nuclear physics.[16] Also in 1930, Teller moved to the University of Göttingen, then one of the world's great centers of physics due to the presence of Max Born and James Franck,[17] but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Germany became unsafe for Jewish people, and he left through the aid of the International Rescue Committee.[18] He went briefly to England, and moved for a year to Copenhagen, where he worked under Niels Bohr.[19] In February 1934, he married his long-time girlfriend Augusta Maria "Mici" (pronounced "Mitzi") Harkanyi, the sister of a friend.[15] He returned to England in September 1934.[20]
Mici had been a student in Pittsburgh, and wanted to return to the United States. Her chance came in 1935, when, thanks to George Gamow, Teller was invited to the United States to become a Professor of Physics at George Washington University, where he worked with Gamow until 1941.[21] At George Washington University in 1937, Teller predicted the Jahn–Teller effect, which distorts molecules in certain situations; this affects the chemical reactions of metals, and in particular the coloration of certain metallic dyes.[22] Teller and Hermann Arthur Jahn analyzed it as a piece of purely mathematical physics. In collaboration with Stephen Brunauer and Paul Hugh Emmett, Teller also made an important contribution to surface physics and chemistry: the so-called Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) isotherm.[23] Teller and Mici became naturalized citizens of the United States on March 6, 1941.[24]
When World War II began, Teller wanted to contribute to the war effort. On the advice of the well-known Caltech aerodynamicist and fellow Hungarian émigré Theodore von Kármán, Teller collaborated with his friend Hans Bethe in developing a theory of shock-wave propagation. In later years, their explanation of the behavior of the gas behind such a wave proved valuable to scientists who were studying missile re-entry.[25]
Manhattan ProjectMain article: Manhattan Project
Teller's ID badge photo from Los AlamosLos Alamos LaboratoryIn 1942, Teller was invited to be part of Robert Oppenheimer's summer planning seminar, at the University of California, Berkeley for the origins of the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to develop the first nuclear weapons. A few weeks earlier, Teller had been meeting with his friend and colleague Enrico Fermi about the prospects of atomic warfare, and Fermi had nonchalantly suggested that perhaps a weapon based on nuclear fission could be used to set off an even larger nuclear fusion reaction. Even though he initially explained to Fermi why he thought the idea would not work, Teller was fascinated by the possibility and was quickly bored with the idea of "just" an atomic bomb even though this was not yet anywhere near completion. At the Berkeley session, Teller diverted discussion from the fission weapon to the possibility of a fusion weapon—what he called the "Super", an early concept of what was later to be known as a hydrogen bomb.[26][27]
Arthur Compton, the chairman of the University of Chicago physics department, coordinated the uranium research of Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. To remove disagreement and duplication, Compton transferred the scientists to the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago.[28] Teller was left behind at first, because while he and Mici were now American citizens, they still had relatives in enemy countries.[29] In early 1943, the Los Alamos Laboratory was established in Los Alamos, New Mexico to design an atomic bomb, with Oppenheimer as its director. Teller moved there in March 1943.[30] Apparently, Teller managed to annoy his neighbors there by playing the piano late in the night.[31]
Teller became part of the Theoretical (T) Division.[32][33] He was given a secret identity of Ed Tilden.[34] He was irked at being passed over as its head; the job was instead given to Hans Bethe. Oppenheimer had him investigate unusual approaches to building fission weapons, such as autocatalysis, in which the efficiency of the bomb would increase as the nuclear chain reaction progressed, but proved to be impractical.[33] He also investigated using uranium hydride instead of uranium metal, but its efficiency turned out to be "negligible or less".[35] He continued to push his ideas for a fusion weapon even though it had been put on a low priority during the war (as the creation of a fission weapon proved to be difficult enough).[32][33] On a visit to New York, he asked Maria Goeppert-Mayer to carry out calculations on the Super for him. She confirmed Teller's own results: the Super was not going to work.[36]
A special group was established under Teller in March 1944 to investigate the mathematics of an implosion-type nuclear weapon.[37] It too ran into difficulties. Because of his interest in the Super, Teller did not work as hard on the implosion calculations as Bethe wanted. These too were originally low-priority tasks, but the discovery of spontaneous fission in plutonium by Emilio Segrè's group gave the implosion bomb increased importance. In June 1944, at Bethe's request, Oppenheimer moved Teller out of T Division, and placed him in charge of a special group responsible for the Super, reporting directly to Oppenheimer. He was replaced by Rudolf Peierls from the British Mission, who in turn brought in Klaus Fuchs, who was later revealed to be a Soviet spy.[38][36] Teller's Super group became part of Fermi's F Division when he joined the Los Alamos Laboratory in September 1944.[38] It included Stanislaw Ulam, Jane Roberg, Geoffrey Chew, Harold and Mary Argo,[39] and Maria Goeppert-Mayer.[40]
Teller made valuable contributions to bomb research, especially in the elucidation of the implosion mechanism. He was the first to propose the solid pit design that was eventually successful. This design became known as a "Christy pit", after the physicist Robert F. Christy who made the pit a reality.[41][42][43][44] Teller was one of the few scientists to actually watch (with eye protection) the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, rather than follow orders to lie on the ground with backs turned. He later said that the atomic flash "was as if I had pulled open the curtain in a dark room and broad daylight streamed in."[45]
Decision to drop the bombsIn the days before and after the first demonstration of a nuclear weapon, the Trinity test in July 1945, his fellow Hungarian Leo Szilard circulated the Szilard petition, which argued that a demonstration to the Japanese of the new weapon should occur prior to actual use on Japan, and with that hopefully the weapons would never be used on people. In response to Szilard's petition, Teller consulted his friend Robert Oppenheimer. Teller believed that Oppenheimer was a natural leader and could help him with such a formidable political problem. Oppenheimer reassured Teller that the nation's fate should be left to the sensible politicians in Washington. Bolstered by Oppenheimer's influence, he decided to not sign the petition.[46]
Teller therefore penned a letter in response to Szilard that read:...I am not really convinced of your objections. I do not feel that there is any chance to outlaw any one weapon. If we have a slim chance of survival, it lies in the possibility to get rid of wars. The more decisive a weapon is the more surely it will be used in any real conflict and no agreements will help. Our only hope is in getting the facts of our results before the people. This might help to convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat-use might even be the best thing.[47]
On reflection on this letter years later when he was writing his memoirs, Teller wrote:First, Szilard was right. As scientists who worked on producing the bomb, we bore a special responsibility. Second, Oppenheimer was right. We did not know enough about the political situation to have a valid opinion. Third, what we should have done but failed to do was to work out the technical changes required for demonstrating the bomb [very high] over Tokyo and submit that information to President Truman.[48]
Unknown to Teller at the time, four of his colleagues were solicited by the then secret May to June 1945 Interim Committee. It is this organization which ultimately decided on how the new weapons should initially be used. The committee's four-member Scientific Panel was led by Oppenheimer, and concluded immediate military use on Japan was the best option:The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender...Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use...We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.[49]
Teller later learned of Oppenheimer's solicitation and his role in the Interim Committee's decision to drop the bombs, having secretly endorsed an immediate military use of the new weapons. This was contrary to the impression that Teller had received when he had personally asked Oppenheimer about the Szilard petition: that the nation's fate should be left to the sensible politicians in Washington. Following Teller's discovery of this, his relationship with his advisor began to deteriorate.[46]
In 1990, the historian Barton Bernstein argued that it is an "unconvincing claim" by Teller that he was a "covert dissenter" to the use of the weapon.[50] In his 2001 Memoirs, Teller claims that he did lobby Oppenheimer, but that Oppenheimer had convinced him that he should take no action and that the scientists should leave military questions in the hands of the military; Teller claims he was not aware that Oppenheimer and other scientists were being consulted as to the actual use of the weapon and implies that Oppenheimer was being hypocritical.[51]
Hydrogen bombMain article: History of the Teller-Ulam designDespite an offer from Norris Bradbury, who had replaced Oppenheimer as the director of Los Alamos in November 1945, to become the head of the Theoretical (T) Division, Teller left Los Alamos on February 1, 1946, to return to the University of Chicago as a professor and close associate of Fermi and Goeppert-Mayer.[52] Mayer's work on the internal structure of the elements would earn her the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.[53]
A group of men in shirtsleeves sitting on folding chairs.Physicists at a Manhattan District-sponsored colloquium at Los Alamos on the Super in April 1946. In the front row are (left to right) Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi and J. M. B. Kellogg. Robert Oppenheimer, in dark coat, is behind Manley; to Oppenheimer's left is Richard Feynman. The Army officer on the left is Colonel Oliver Haywood.On April 18–20, 1946, Teller participated in a conference at Los Alamos to review the wartime work on the Super. The properties of thermonuclear fuels such as deuterium and the possible design of a hydrogen bomb were discussed. It was concluded that Teller's assessment of a hydrogen bomb had been too favourable, and that both the quantity of deuterium needed, as well as the radiation losses during deuterium burning, would shed doubt on its workability. Addition of expensive tritium to the thermonuclear mixture would likely lower its ignition temperature, but even so, nobody knew at that time how much tritium would be needed, and whether even tritium addition would encourage heat propagation.[54][55]
At the end of the conference, in spite of opposition by some members such as Robert Serber, Teller submitted an optimistic report in which he said that a hydrogen bomb was feasible, and that further work should be encouraged on its development. Fuchs also participated in this conference, and transmitted this information to Moscow. With John von Neumann, he contributed an idea of using implosion to ignite the Super. The model of Teller's "classical Super" was so uncertain that Oppenheimer would later say that he wished the Russians were building their own hydrogen bomb based on that design, so that it would almost certainly retard their progress on it.[54]
Classified paper by Teller and Ulam on March 9, 1951: On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors, in which they proposed their revolutionary new design, staged implosion, the secret of the hydrogen bomb.
The Teller–Ulam design kept the fission and fusion fuel physically separated from one another, and used X-rays from the primary device "reflected" off the surrounding casing to compress the secondary.By 1949, Soviet-backed governments had already begun seizing control throughout Eastern Europe, forming such puppet states as the Hungarian People's Republic in Teller's homeland of Hungary, where much of his family still lived, on August 20, 1949.[56] Following the Soviet Union's first test detonation of an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, President Harry Truman announced a crash development program for a hydrogen bomb.[57]
Teller returned to Los Alamos in 1950 to work on the project. He insisted on involving more theorists. but many of Teller's prominent colleagues, like Fermi and Oppenheimer, were sure that the project of the H-bomb was technically infeasible and politically undesirable. None of the available designs were yet workable.[57] However Soviet scientists who had worked on their own hydrogen bomb have claimed that they developed it independently.[58]
In 1950, calculations by the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and his collaborator Cornelius Everett, along with confirmations by Fermi, had shown that not only was Teller's earlier estimate of the quantity of tritium needed for the H-bomb a low one, but that even with higher amounts of tritium, the energy loss in the fusion process would be too great to enable the fusion reaction to propagate. However, in 1951 Teller and Ulam made a breakthrough, and invented a new design, proposed in a classified March 1951 paper, On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors, for a practical megaton-range H-bomb. The exact contribution provided respectively from Ulam and Teller to what became known as the Teller–Ulam design is not definitively known in the public domain, and the exact contributions of each and how the final idea was arrived upon has been a point of dispute in both public and classified discussions since the early 1950s.[59]
In an interview with Scientific American from 1999, Teller told the reporter:
I contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and had difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, "I don't believe in it."[7]
The issue is controversial. Bethe considered Teller's contribution to the invention of the H-bomb a true innovation as early as 1952,[60] and referred to his work as a "stroke of genius" in 1954.[61] In both cases, however, Bethe emphasized Teller's role as a way of stressing that the development of the H-bomb could not have been hastened by additional support or funding, and Teller greatly disagreed with Bethe's assessment. Other scientists (antagonistic to Teller, such as J. Carson Mark) have claimed that Teller would have never gotten any closer without the assistance of Ulam and others.[62] Ulam himself claimed that Teller only produced a "more generalized" version of Ulam's original design.[63]
The breakthrough—the details of which are still classified—was apparently the separation of the fission and fusion components of the weapons, and to use the X-rays produced by the fission bomb to first compress the fusion fuel (by process known as "radiation implosion") before igniting it. Ulam's idea seems to have been to use mechanical shock from the primary to encourage fusion in the secondary, while Teller quickly realized that X-rays from the primary would do the job much more symmetrically. Some members of the laboratory (J. Carson Mark in particular) later expressed the opinion that the idea to use the x-rays would have eventually occurred to anyone working on the physical processes involved, and that the obvious reason why Teller thought of it right away was because he was already working on the "Greenhouse" tests for the spring of 1951, in which the effect of x-rays from a fission bomb on a mixture of deuterium and tritium was going to be investigated.[59]
Whatever the actual components of the so-called Teller–Ulam design and the respective contributions of those who worked on it, after it was proposed it was immediately seen by the scientists working on the project as the answer which had been so long sought. Those who previously had doubted whether a fission-fusion bomb would be feasible at all were converted into believing that it was only a matter of time before both the USA and the USSR had developed multi-megaton weapons. Even Oppenheimer, who was originally opposed to the project, called the idea "technically sweet."[64]The 10.4 Mt "Ivy Mike" shot of 1952 appeared to vindicate Teller's long-time advocacy for the hydrogen bomb.Though he had helped to come up with the design and had been a long-time proponent of the concept, Teller was not chosen to head the development project (his reputation of a thorny personality likely played a role in this). In 1952 he left Los Alamos and joined the newly established Livermore branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory, which had been created largely through his urging. After the detonation of Ivy Mike, the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the Teller–Ulam configuration, on November 1, 1952, Teller became known in the press as the "father of the hydrogen bomb." Teller himself refrained from attending the test—he claimed not to feel welcome at the Pacific Proving Grounds—and instead saw its results on a seismograph in the basement of a hall in Berkeley.[65]
There was an opinion that by analyzing the fallout from this test, the Soviets (led in their H-bomb work by Andrei Sakharov) could have deciphered the new American design. However, this was later denied by the Soviet bomb researchers.[66] Because of official secrecy, little information about the bomb's development was released by the government, and press reports often attributed the entire weapon's design and development to Teller and his new Livermore Laboratory (when it was actually developed by Los Alamos).[58]
Many of Teller's colleagues were irritated that he seemed to enjoy taking full credit for something he had only a part in, and in response, with encouragement from Enrico Fermi, Teller authored an article titled "The Work of Many People," which appeared in Science magazine in February 1955, emphasizing that he was not alone in the weapon's development. He would later write in his memoirs that he had told a "white lie" in the 1955 article in order to "soothe ruffled feelings", and claimed full credit for the invention.[67][68]
Teller was known for getting engrossed in projects which were theoretically interesting but practically unfeasible (the classic "Super" was one such project.)[31] About his work on the hydrogen bomb, Bethe said:
Nobody will blame Teller because the calculations of 1946 were wrong, especially because adequate computing machines were not available at Los Alamos. But he was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous programme on the basis of calculations, which he himself must have known to have been very incomplete.[69]
During the Manhattan Project, Teller advocated the development of a bomb using uranium hydride, which many of his fellow theorists said would be unlikely to work.[70] At Livermore, Teller continued work on the hydride bomb, and the result was a dud.[71] Ulam once wrote to a colleague about an idea he had shared with Teller: "Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities; this is perhaps an indication they will not work."[72] Fermi once said that Teller was the only monomaniac he knew who had several manias.[73]
Carey Sublette of Nuclear Weapon Archive argues that Ulam came up with the radiation implosion compression design of thermonuclear weapons, but that on the other hand Teller has gotten little credit for being the first to propose fusion boosting in 1945, which is essential for miniaturization and reliability and is used in all of today's nuclear weapons.[74]
Oppenheimer controversy
Teller testified about J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1954.Teller became controversial in 1954 when he testified against Oppenheimer at Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing. Teller had clashed with Oppenheimer many times at Los Alamos over issues relating both to fission and fusion research, and during Oppenheimer's trial he was the only member of the scientific community to state that Oppenheimer should not be granted security clearance.[75]
Asked at the hearing by Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) attorney Roger Robb whether he was planning "to suggest that Dr. Oppenheimer is disloyal to the United States", Teller replied that:
I do not want to suggest anything of the kind. I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and a very complicated person, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my part if I would try in any way to analyze his motives. But I have always assumed, and I now assume that he is loyal to the United States. I believe this, and I shall believe it until I see very conclusive proof to the opposite.[76]
He was immediately asked whether he believed that Oppenheimer was a "security risk", to which he testified:In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.[61]
Teller also testified that Oppenheimer's opinion about the thermonuclear program seemed to be based more on the scientific feasibility of the weapon than anything else. He additionally testified that Oppenheimer's direction of Los Alamos was "a very outstanding achievement" both as a scientist and an administrator, lauding his "very quick mind" and that he made "just a most wonderful and excellent director."[61]
After this, however, he detailed ways in which he felt that Oppenheimer had hindered his efforts towards an active thermonuclear development program, and at length criticized Oppenheimer's decisions not to invest more work onto the question at different points in his career, saying: "If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance."[61]
By recasting a difference of judgment over the merits of the early work on the hydrogen bomb project into a matter of a security risk, Teller effectively damned Oppenheimer in a field where security was necessarily of paramount concern. Teller's testimony thereby rendered Oppenheimer vulnerable to charges by a Congressional aide that he was a Soviet spy, which resulted in the destruction of Oppenheimer's career.[77]
Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked after the hearings. Most of Teller's former colleagues disapproved of his testimony and he was ostracized by much of the scientific community.[75] After the fact, Teller consistently denied that he was intending to damn Oppenheimer, and even claimed that he was attempting to exonerate him. However, documentary evidence has suggested that this was likely not the case. Six days before the testimony, Teller met with an AEC liaison officer and suggested "deepening the charges" in his testimony.[78]
Teller always insisted that his testimony had not significantly harmed Oppenheimer. In 2002, Teller contended that Oppenheimer was "not destroyed" by the security hearing but "no longer asked to assist in policy matters." He claimed his words were an overreaction, because he had only just learned of Oppenheimer's failure to immediately report an approach by Haakon Chevalier, who had approached Oppenheimer to help the Russians. Teller said that, in hindsight, he would have responded differently.[75]
Historian Richard Rhodes said that in his opinion it was already a foregone conclusion that Oppenheimer would have his security clearance revoked by then AEC chairman Lewis Strauss, regardless of Teller's testimony. However, as Teller's testimony was the most damning, he was singled out and blamed for the hearing's ruling, losing friends due to it, such as Robert Christy, who refused to shake his hand in one infamous incident. This was emblematic of his later treatment which resulted in his being forced into the role of an outcast of the physics community, thus leaving him little choice but to align himself with industrialists.[79]
US government work and political advocacyAfter the Oppenheimer controversy, Teller became ostracized by much of the scientific community, but was still quite welcome in the government and military science circles. Along with his traditional advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program, he had helped to develop nuclear reactor safety standards as the chair of the Reactor Safeguard Committee of the AEC in the late 1940s,[80] and in the late 1950s headed an effort at General Atomics which designed research reactors in which a nuclear meltdown would be impossible. The TRIGA (Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomic) has been built and used in hundreds of hospitals and universities worldwide for medical isotope production and research.[81]
Teller promoted increased defense spending to counter the perceived Soviet missile threat. He was a signatory to the 1958 report by the military sub-panel of the Rockefeller Brothers funded Special Studies Project, which called for a $3 billion annual increase in America's military budget.[82]
In 1956 he attended the Project Nobska anti-submarine warfare conference, where discussion ranged from oceanography to nuclear weapons. In the course of discussing a small nuclear warhead for the Mark 45 torpedo, he started a discussion on the possibility of developing a physically small one-megaton nuclear warhead for the Polaris missile. His counterpart in the discussion, J. Carson Mark from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, at first insisted it could not be done. However, Dr. Mark eventually stated that a half-megaton warhead of small enough size could be developed. This yield, roughly thirty times that of the Hiroshima bomb, was enough for Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke, who was present in person, and Navy strategic missile development shifted from Jupiter to Polaris by the end of the year.[83]
He was Director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which he helped to found with Ernest O. Lawrence, from 1958 to 1960, and after that he continued as an Associate Director. He chaired the committee that founded the Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley. He also served concurrently as a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.[84] He was a tireless advocate of a strong nuclear program and argued for continued testing and development—in fact, he stepped down from the directorship of Livermore so that he could better lobby against the proposed test ban. He testified against the test ban both before Congress as well as on television.[85]
Teller established the Department of Applied Science at the University of California, Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1963, which holds the Edward Teller endowed professorship in his honor.[86] In 1975 he retired from both the lab and Berkeley, and was named Director Emeritus of the Livermore Laboratory and appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.[31] After the fall of communism in Hungary in 1989, he made several visits to his country of origin, and paid careful attention to the political changes there.[87]
Global climate changeTeller was one of the first prominent people to raise the danger of climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels. At an address to the membership of the American Chemical Society in December 1957, Teller warned that the large amount of carbon-based fuel that had been burnt since the mid-19th century was increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would "act in the same way as a greenhouse and will raise the temperature at the surface", and that he had calculated that if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by 10% "an appreciable part of the polar ice might melt."[88]
In 1959, at a symposium organised by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business for the centennial of the American oil industry, Edward Teller warned that:[89]
I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. [...] And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. [...] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. [...] Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect [....] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.
Operation Plowshare and Project Chariot
One of the Chariot schemes involved chaining five thermonuclear devices to create the artificial harbor.Teller was one of the strongest and best-known advocates for investigating non-military uses of nuclear explosives, which the United States explored under Operation Plowshare. One of the most controversial projects he proposed was a plan to use a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb to dig a deep-water harbor more than a mile long and half a mile wide to use for shipment of resources from coal and oil fields through Point Hope, Alaska. The Atomic Energy Commission accepted Teller's proposal in 1958 and it was designated Project Chariot. While the AEC was scouting out the Alaskan site, and having withdrawn the land from the public domain, Teller publicly advocated the economic benefits of the plan, but was unable to convince local government leaders that the plan was financially viable.[90]
Other scientists criticized the project as being potentially unsafe for the local wildlife and the Inupiat people living near the designated area, who were not officially told of the plan until March 1960.[91][92] Additionally, it turned out that the harbor would be ice-bound for nine months out of the year. In the end, due to the financial infeasibility of the project and the concerns over radiation-related health issues, the project was abandoned in 1962.[93]
A related experiment which also had Teller's endorsement was a plan to extract oil from the tar sands in northern Alberta with nuclear explosions, titled Project Oilsands. The plan actually received the endorsement of the Alberta government, but was rejected by the Government of Canada under Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was opposed to having any nuclear weapons in Canada. After Diefenbaker was out of office, Canada went on to have nuclear weapons, from a US nuclear sharing agreement, from 1963 to 1984.[94][95]
Nuclear technology and IsraelMain articles: Israeli nuclear program and Israel and weapons of mass destructionFor some twenty years, Teller advised Israel on nuclear matters in general, and on the building of a hydrogen bomb in particular.[96] In 1952, Teller and Oppenheimer had a long meeting with David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv, telling him that the best way to accumulate plutonium was to burn natural uranium in a nuclear reactor. Starting in 1964, a connection between Teller and Israel was made by the physicist Yuval Ne'eman, who had similar political views. Between 1964 and 1967, Teller visited Israel six times, lecturing at Tel Aviv University, and advising the chiefs of Israel's scientific-security circle as well as prime ministers and cabinet members.[97]
In 1967 when the Israeli nuclear program was nearing completion, Teller informed Neeman that he was going to tell the CIA that Israel had built nuclear weapons, and explain that it was justified by the background of the Six-Day War. After Neeman cleared it with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Teller briefed the head of the CIA's Office of Science and Technology, Carl Duckett. It took a year for Teller to convince the CIA that Israel had obtained nuclear capability; the information then went through CIA Director Richard Helms to the president at that time, Lyndon B. Johnson. Teller also persuaded them to end the American attempts to inspect the Negev Nuclear Research Center in Dimona. In 1976 Duckett testified in Congress before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that after receiving information from "American scientist", he drafted a National Intelligence Estimate on Israel's nuclear capability.[98]
In the 1980s, Teller again visited Israel to advise the Israeli government on building a nuclear reactor.[99] Three decades later, Teller confirmed that it was during his visits that he concluded that Israel was in possession of nuclear weapons. After conveying the matter to the U.S. government, Teller reportedly said: "They [Israel] have it, and they were clever enough to trust their research and not to test, they know that to test would get them into trouble."[98]
Three Mile IslandTeller suffered a heart attack in 1979, and blamed it on Jane Fonda, who had starred in The China Syndrome, which depicted a fictional reactor accident and was released less than two weeks before the Three Mile Island accident. She spoke out against nuclear power while promoting the film. After the accident, Teller acted quickly to lobby in defence of nuclear energy, testifying to its safety and reliability, and soon after one flurry of activity suffered the attack. He signed a two-page-spread ad in the July 31, 1979, Wall Street Journal with the headline "I was the only victim of Three-Mile Island".[100] It opened with:On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.[101]
Strategic Defense InitiativeSee also: Project Excalibur
Teller became a major lobbying force of the Strategic Defense Initiative to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.In the 1980s, Teller began a strong campaign for what was later called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derided by critics as "Star Wars," the concept of using ground and satellite-based lasers, particle beams and missiles to destroy incoming Soviet ICBMs. Teller lobbied with government agencies—and got the approval of President Ronald Reagan—for a plan to develop a system using elaborate satellites which used atomic weapons to fire X-ray lasers at incoming missiles—as part of a broader scientific research program into defenses against nuclear weapons.[102]
Scandal erupted when Teller (and his associate Lowell Wood) were accused of deliberately overselling the program and perhaps encouraging the dismissal of a laboratory director (Roy Woodruff) who had attempted to correct the error.[103] His claims led to a joke which circulated in the scientific community, that a new unit of unfounded optimism was designated as the teller; one teller was so large that most events had to be measured in nanotellers or picotellers.[104]
Many prominent scientists argued that the system was futile. Hans Bethe, along with IBM physicist Richard Garwin and Cornell University colleague Kurt Gottfried, wrote an article in Scientific American which analyzed the system and concluded that any putative enemy could disable such a system by the use of suitable decoys that would cost a very small fraction of the SDI program.[105]
In 1987 Teller published a book supporting civil defense and active protection systems such as SDI which was titled Better a Shield than a Sword and his views on the role of lasers in SDI were published, and are available, in two 1986-7 laser conference proceedings.[106][107]
Asteroid impact avoidanceMain article: Asteroid impact avoidanceFollowing the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impacts with Jupiter, Teller proposed to a collective of U.S. and Russian ex-Cold War weapons designers in a 1995 planetary defense workshop at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, that they collaborate to design a 1 gigaton nuclear explosive device, which would be equivalent to the kinetic energy of a 1 km diameter asteroid.[108][109][110] In order to safeguard the earth, the theoretical 1 Gt device would weigh about 25–30 tons, hence light enough to be lifted on the Russian Energia rocket and it could be used to instantaneously vaporize a 1 km asteroid, divert the paths of extinction event class asteroids (greater than 10 km in diameter) within a few months of short notice, while with 1-year notice, at an interception location no closer than Jupiter, it would also be capable of dealing with the even rarer short period comets which can come out of the Kuiper belt and transit past Earth orbit within 2 years. For comets of this class, with a maximum estimated 100 km diameter, Charon served as the hypothetical threat.[108][109][110]
Death and legacy
Edward Teller in his later years
Appearing on British television discussion After Dark in 1987Teller died in Stanford, California on September 9, 2003, at the age of 95.[31] He had suffered a stroke two days before and had long been suffering from a number of conditions related to his advanced age.[111]
A wish for his 100th birthday, made around the time of his 90th, was for Lawrence Livermore's scientists to give him "excellent predictions—calculations and experiments—about the interiors of the planets".[15]
In his early career, Teller made contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Fermi's theory of beta decay (in the form of the so-called Gamow–Teller transitions) provided an important stepping stone in the applications of this theory. The Jahn–Teller effect and the BET theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry.[2] Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules.
Teller's vigorous advocacy for strength through nuclear weapons, especially when so many of his wartime colleagues later expressed regret about the arms race, made him an easy target for the "mad scientist" stereotype. In 1991 he was awarded one of the first Ig Nobel Prizes for Peace in recognition of his "lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it". He was also rumored to be one of the inspirations for the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satirical film of the same name[31] (others speculated to be RAND theorist Herman Kahn, mathematician John von Neumann, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara). In the aforementioned Scientific American interview from 1999, he was reported as having bristled at the question: "My name is not Strangelove. I don't know about Strangelove. I'm not interested in Strangelove. What else can I say?... Look. Say it three times more, and I throw you out of this office."[7] In one episode of Mission Hill (1999), a character appears to be inspired by Edward Teller. The character is very old, has pictures of himself and other scientists in his home office and is known as the father of the nuclear bomb.
Nobel Prize winning physicist Isidor I. Rabi once suggested that "It would have been a better world without Teller."[112] In addition, Teller's false claims that Stanislaw Ulam made no significant contribution to the development of the hydrogen bomb (despite Ulam's key insights of using compression and staging elements to generate the thermonuclear reaction) and his personal attacks on Oppenheimer caused great animosity towards Teller within the general physics community.[113]
In 1981, Teller became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.[114]
In 1986, he was awarded the United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award. He was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1948.[115] He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Nuclear Society.[116] Among the honors he received were the Albert Einstein Award in 1958,[84] the Enrico Fermi Award in 1962,[84] the Eringen Medal in 1980,[117] the Harvey Prize in 1975, the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989,[84] and the Corvin Chain [hu] in 2001.[118] He was also named as part of the group of "U.S. Scientists" who were Time magazine's People of the Year in 1960,[119] and an asteroid, 5006 Teller, is named after him.[120] He was awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2003, less than two months before his death.[31]
His final paper, published posthumously, advocated the construction of a prototype liquid fluoride thorium reactor.[121][122] The genesis and impetus for this last paper, was recounted by the co-author Ralph Moir in 2007.[123]
BibliographyOur Nuclear Future; Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities (1958)Basic Concepts of Physics (1960)The Legacy of Hiroshima (1962)The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosions (1968)Energy from Heaven and Earth (1979)The Pursuit of Simplicity (1980)Better a Shield Than a Sword: Perspectives on Defense and Technology (1987)Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics (1991)Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (2001)
At the end of his long life Edward Teller with the helpof his editor Judith Shoolery published his memoirs(2001), a lively and poignant account of his adventuresin science and politics. Hostile reviewers of the memoirspointed out that some details of his stories are inaccurate.But Teller writes in his introduction, “Our memories areselective; they delete some events and magnify others. Justthe simple act of recalling the past affects the recollection ofwhat happened. That some of my remembrances are not thecommonly accepted version of events should not be surprising.” Memoirs are not history. Memoirs are the raw materialfor history. Memoirs written by generals and politicians arenotoriously inaccurate. A writer of memoirs should make anhonest attempt to set down the course of events as they arerecorded in memory. This Teller did. If some of the detailsare wrong, this detracts little from the value of his book asa panorama of a historical epoch in which he played a leading role. I have used the memoirs as the basis for this briefsummary of his career.Teller was born in 1908 into a prosperous middle-classJewish family in Budapest. He lived through the turbulentyears of World War I, the dismemberment of the AustroHungarian Empire, the short-lived Communist regime of BelaB IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSKun, and the devastating currency inflation that followed,protected by loving and resourceful parents. All through hislife, from childhood to old age, he had a gift for friendship.His memoirs are full of stories about his friends and the tragicfates that many of them encountered. He cared deeply forthem as individuals and described them with sympatheticunderstanding. He escaped from sharing their fate when heemigrated from Hungary to Germany in 1926, from Germanyto Denmark in 1933, to England in 1934, and to America in1935. He always retained an acute sense of the precariousness of human life and the fragility of political institutions.He was one of the lucky survivors of a great tragedy, whenbarbarians overran Europe and destroyed the world of hischildhood. He saw America as the last refuge, for himselfand for the civilization that he cherished. That was why hesaw it as his inescapable duty to keep America armed withthe most effective weapons, with bombs for deterring attack,and with missiles for active defense.The springtime years of Teller’s professional life, theyears when he was happiest with his work and his friends,were the seven years between 1926 and 1933 that he spentas a student in Germany. His stay in Germany started badly.Riding a trolley car in Munich to meet some friends for ahiking trip, he overshot the meeting place, jumped off themoving trolley car, and fell under the wheels. His rightfoot was chopped in half. As he lay in the road assessingthe damage, he thought how lucky he was not to be one ofthe millions of young men who had lain wounded on themuddy battlefields of World War I a few years earlier. Atleast he was alive, with a clean wound and the certainty ofbeing rescued. The surgeon in Munich reconstructed whatwas left of his foot so that he could still walk on the heel.With the help of a prosthesis he became agile enough to gohiking in the mountains and to play a respectable game ofEDWARD TELLERPing-Pong. He observed that his mother suffered more thanhe did from the accident. As she sat grieving by his bedsideat the hospital, he tried unsuccessfully to cheer her up. Forher it was a deeply tragic event, while for him it was merely anuisance that did not touch the important things in his life.The accident gave him confidence. As he liked to say when Igot to know him 20 years later, if it doesn’t kill you, it makesyou stronger. The accident gave him a good excuse to leaveMunich and go to Leipzig to work with Heisenberg.The years 1926-1933 were the time when German sciencewas blazing with creative activity while the Weimar Republicwas crumbling. When Teller joined the group of young peopleworking at Leipzig with Heisenberg as leader, Heisenbergwas 28. He had invented quantum mechanics in 1925 andthen invited all and sundry to join him in using quantummechanics to understand the workings of nature. Quantummechanics described the behavior of atoms, and so it shouldbe able to explain everything that atoms do. It should bepossible with quantum mechanics to explain all of atomicphysics, most of solid-state physics, most of astrophysics, andall of chemistry. There were enough good problems, so thatevery student could find something important to do. Teller,having been trained as a chemist, chose chemistry as thesubject to be explained with quantum mechanics. He startedwell by beating Heisenberg at Ping-Pong. He and Heisenbergremained friends for life. After World War II, when manyAmerican physicists condemned Heisenberg for staying inGermany through the Hitler years, Teller went out of his wayto befriend him. He knew that Heisenberg had never beena Nazi, and he respected Heisenberg’s decision to stay loyalto his country and share its fate.In Leipzig Teller wrote a Ph. D. thesis (1930) on the hydrogen molecule ion, the simplest of all molecules. He wasable to calculate not only the ground state but also the excitedB IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSquantum states of the molecule, using an old-fashioned mechanical calculator. But he did not enjoy working alone. Hemuch preferred the give-and-take of working together withfriends. Almost all his work after the thesis was done jointlywith others. During his years in Germany he collaboratedfruitfully with Lev Landau, George Placzek, and James Franck,solving various problems on the borderline between physicsand chemistry. As he himself said, he was a problem solverrather than a deep thinker. He enjoyed solving problems,whether or not they were important. The years 1926-1933were harvest time for problem solvers. In those years theproblem solvers laid the foundations for most of modernphysics and chemistry. Teller’s main contributions during thistime were to explain diamagnetism in solids (1931), and toexplain spectra of polyatomic molecules (1933). Both theseproblems required the application of quantum mechanicsto systems involving many electrons.When Hitler took power in 1933, Teller moved to Copenhagen. There he met George Gamow, a young Russian whohad been the first to apply quantum mechanics to nuclearphysics. In 1934 Gamow moved to George Washington University in Washington, D.C, and Teller moved to Londonwith his newly wed wife, Mici. She was a childhood friendfrom Budapest who loved and sustained him through allhis joys and sorrows, and remained by his side for 66 yearsuntil her death in 2000. In 1935 Gamow invited Teller tojoin him at George Washington University, and Mici, whohad spent two years in America as a student, encouragedhim to accept. During the years 1935-1939 that Gamow andTeller were together in Washington, they almost recreatedthe golden age of German physics in America. They foundmany of their European friends already in America, andquickly made new friends among the natives.EDWARD TELLERGamow was four years younger than Heisenberg andalmost as brilliant. But Gamow had no skill as an organizerand no desire to be a leader like Heisenberg. He producedbrilliant new ideas at a rapid rate, and left it to Teller towork out the details. He also left to Teller the chores ofadministration, organizing meetings, and taking care ofstudents. Teller worked happily with Gamow and also withother collaborators. The most important results of Teller’sresearch during this time were the Gamow-Teller theoryof weak interactions (1936) and the Jahn-Teller theory ofpolyatomic molecules with electrons in degenerate states(1937). The Gamow-Teller theory was in competition withan alternative theory due to Fermi. This was one of the veryfew occasions on which Fermi guessed wrong. The GamowTeller theory was Teller’s first venture into nuclear physics.Twenty years later it became the basis for a unified theoryof weak interactions.One of Teller’s friends in Washington was Merle Tuve,an American and a first-rate physicist who built particle accelerators and used them to do nuclear experiments at theDepartment of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution. Tuve was one of the pioneers of accelerator physics,and made the first accurate measurements of the nuclearinteraction between two protons. After Teller had spent asummer teaching in Chicago, the University of Chicago wasthinking of offering him a permanent job. The Chicagophysicists wrote to Tuve asking for his opinion of Teller. Tuvewrote back, “If you want a genius for your staff, don’t takeTeller, get Gamow. But geniuses are a dime a dozen. Telleris something much better. He helps everybody. He workson everybody’s problem. He never gets into controversiesor has trouble with anyone. He is by far your best choice.”Teller quotes this letter in his memoirs and remarks, “I dobelieve it described me as I was during those happy yearsB IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSin Washington.” He looked back on those years with nostalgia as a time when he could do science with everyone andbe friends with everyone, before the bitter struggles overnuclear politics took him away from science and tore aparthis friendships.The record of Teller’s publications confirms Tuve’s statement. Teller in the first half of his life had an unusual giftfor fruitful collaborations. I have taken 1952 as the pointof division between the two halves of his life. In 1952 hemoved from the University of Chicago to the new weaponslaboratory that he founded at Lawrence Livermore NationalLaboratory in California. That was the year when he stoppedbeing an academic scientist and became a full-time nuclearentrepreneur. In the bibliography of his technical publications there are 146 papers. Before 1952 he wrote 7 papersalone and 77 with collaborators. In that period most of hispapers describe research done with one collaborator. Manyof the leading physicists of that time appear as collaborators. After 1952 he wrote 42 papers alone and 20 with collaborators. In that period most of the papers are reviews orlectures, describing plans for the future or surveys of thepast. The transition from a gregarious to a solitary patternof intellectual life is painfully clear.In January 1939 Gamow and Teller were hosts at themeeting of theoretical physicists, which was held annuallyat George Washington University. That year’s meeting wassupposed to be devoted to low-temperature physics. On thefirst morning of the meeting Gamow introduced Niels Bohr,who had just arrived on a ship from Denmark, and Bohr toldthe assembled physicists the news of the discovery of fissionof uranium in Germany a month before. In the evening ofthe same day Merle Tuve invited everyone to his laboratoryto see a demonstration of the intense bursts of ionizationEDWARD TELLERproduced by uranium fission in a Geiger counter. The ageof nuclear energy had arrived, and Teller was involved in itfrom the first day.In February 1939 Teller’s friend Leo Szilard called himfrom New York to announce that he had found abundantsecondary neutrons emitted in uranium fission. This meantthat an explosive nuclear chain reaction was certainly possible. In March 1939 an informal strategy meeting was held inPrinceton. Present were Bohr, Wheeler, Wigner, Weisskopf,Szilard, and Teller. One American, one Dane, one Austrian,and three Hungarians. Two decisions were made; first tokeep further discoveries about fission secret so far as possible, second to try to bring the situation to the attention ofresponsible people in the American government.In June 1939 Teller moved from Washington to ColumbiaUniversity to help Fermi and Szilard with their project to buildthe first nuclear reactor. In New York a few weeks before theoutbreak of World War II, Heisenberg came to visit Teller.He was on his way back to Germany from a lecture tour inAmerica. He had many offers of jobs in America and couldeasily have stayed. Teller asked him why he was going backto a country that was clearly headed for disaster. Heisenbergreplied, “Even if my brother steals a silver spoon, he is stillmy brother.” Teller understood that nothing he could saywould cause Heisenberg to change his mind.A few days later Szilard, who could not drive a car, cameto see Teller and asked him for a ride. Szilard had written aletter to President Roosevelt informing him of the discoveryof fission and the possibility of nuclear bombs. The letterasked the President to set up a channel of communicationbetween the government and the physicists working onnuclear chain reactions in America. Szilard’s plan was topersuade Einstein to sign the letter. Teller was needed as achauffeur to bring Szilard and the letter to Einstein’s summer10 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRShome on Long Island. Einstein signed the letter, and Szilardsuccessfully delivered it to Roosevelt. As a result, an officialAdvisory Committee on Uranium was established, and thebureaucratic machinery that later grew into the ManhattanProject slowly began to grind.Teller worked on nuclear energy from 1939 to 1945: twoyears at Columbia University helping Fermi design the firstnuclear reactor, two years at the Metallurgical Laboratory inChicago helping to design the Hanford plutonium productionreactors, and two years at Los Alamos National Laboratoryworking on bombs. In all three places he worked on a varietyof projects. His wide knowledge of physics and chemistrymade him useful as a liaison between different parts of theenterprise. The one thing that he could not and would notdo was to sit down and do precise theoretical calculations. Histhesis work, calculating the states of the hydrogen moleculeion, had given him a lifelong distaste for lengthy calculations. At Los Alamos this brought him into collision withHans Bethe, the head of the Theoretical Division, who wasTeller’s boss. Bethe asked him to do a massive calculationof the physics and hydrodynamics of an imploding bomb.Teller refused, saying that if he tried to do such a calculation he would not make any useful contribution to the wareffort. Teller’s friendship with Bethe never recovered fromthis disagreement. Oppenheimer moved Teller out of Bethe’sdivision and made him leader of an independent group.After that, Teller reported directly to Oppenheimer, andOppenheimer kept him busy with a variety of assignmentsmore suited to his temperament. Teller enjoyed working forOppenheimer and considered him an excellent director.During the wartime years Teller worked only intermittently on hydrogen bombs. This work started in the summerof 1942 when Oppenheimer held a meeting in Berkeley toexplore the possibilities. The meeting concluded that if aEDWARD TELLER 11fission bomb could be made to work, it could probably beused to ignite a hydrogen bomb. After the meeting Tellerfound reasons why the ignition would not work. He becameseriously interested in the problem and continued to thinkabout it. During his two years at Los Alamos he spent aboutone-third of his time working on hydrogen bombs. The result of his efforts was a very sketchy design called the Classical Super. The question whether the Classical Super wouldwork could only be decided by massive calculations, usingelectronic computers that did not yet exist. There mattersstood from 1945 to 1950.From 1946 to 1952 Teller was a professor at the University of Chicago. He enjoyed the return to academic lifeand especially enjoyed interacting with a brilliant bunch ofstudents, including Chen Ning Yang, Tsung Dao Lee, Marshall Rosenbluth, and Marvin Goldberger. Two of his closestfriends, Enrico Fermi and Maria Mayer, were colleagues.During these years he worked with Fermi on the capture ofnegative mesons in matter (1947), with Mayer on the originof the chemical elements (1949), and with Robert Richtmyeron the origin of cosmic rays (1949). I met Teller for the firsttime in March 1949 when I gave a colloquium in Chicagowith Fermi and Teller sitting side by side in the front row. Ispoke about the new theories of quantum electrodynamics. Imade some very polite remarks about Schwinger’s theory andthen explained why Feynman’s theory was better. As soon asI finished my talk, Teller asked a question and answered ithimself. “What would you think of a man who cried, ‘Thereis no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,’ andthen at once drank down a great tankard of wine? I wouldconsider him a very sensible fellow.” Afterward I was able tomeet with Teller alone and he talked happily about all thethings he was doing.12 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSI quote now from a letter that I wrote to my parents inEngland, dated March 11, 1949.Teller to me has always been an enigma. He has done all kinds of interesting things in physics, but never the same thing for long, and he seems todo physics for fun rather than for glory. However, during the last few yearsthere have been reports that he has been engaged in perfecting the mostfiendish engines of destruction; and I have always wondered how such a mancould do such things. In Chicago I found without difficulty the answer. Istarted a long argument with him about political questions, and it appearsthat he is an ardent supporter of the ‘World Government’ movement, anorganization which preaches salvation in the form of a world government,to be set up in the near future with or without Russia, and to have sovereignpowers over the economic and social policies of its member nations. Tellerevidently finds this faith soothing to his conscience; he preaches it withgreat charm and intelligence; all the same, I feel that he is a good exampleof the saying that no man is so dangerous as an idealist.In the same letter there is a passage describing the community of physicists in Chicago.The most striking thing about all these people, and also their wives whom Imet as I went from house to house and from family to family, is how happythey seem to be. All of them say they have never found any place on earthso pleasant to be in as Chicago. There seems to be an exceptionally freeand easy atmosphere, rather like Cornell, and with the added advantagesof a metropolitan city.These were the golden years of physics in Chicago,when Fermi was king and Teller was his court jester. Tellerenjoyed those years to the full. But during those same yearshe could not stop thinking about the question that he hadleft unanswered when he left Los Alamos in 1946. Could ahydrogen bomb be made to work? In June 1949 he returnedto Los Alamos to continue his lonely effort to understandwhat Nature allows us to do. In August the first Russiannuclear bomb was tested, and in January 1950 PresidentTruman announced that work on the “so-called hydrogenor super bomb” would continue. After the President’sEDWARD TELLER 13announcement Teller wrote to Maria Mayer from Los Alamos.“Whatever help and whatever advice I can get from you—Ineed it. Not because I feel subjectively that I must have help,but because I know objectively that we are in a situation inwhich any sane person must and does throw up his handsand only the crazy ones keep going.”In 1950 electronic computers were able to simulate ina rough fashion the Classical Super design for a hydrogenbomb and showed that it did not work. George Gamow drewa famous cartoon of Teller trying to set fire to a wet piece ofrock with a match. But to Teller the downfall of the ClassicalSuper came as a liberation. For eight years his thoughts hadbeen fixed on the Classical Super, which required deuteriumto burn at low density, so that radiation could escape fromthe burning region and not come to thermal equilibriumwith the matter. The idea was to achieve a runaway burn,with the temperature of the matter remaining much higherthan the temperature of the radiation. The computers showedthat runaway burn did not work. So Teller started to lookseriously at the opposite situation, with deuterium at highdensity and the radiation trapped in thermal equilibriumwith the matter.Teller quickly found that at high density, deuterium couldburn well in thermal equilibrium. From that point it was ashort step to design an arrangement by which a fission bombcould compress deuterium to high density and then igniteit. Teller’s colleague Stanislas Ulam at Los Alamos thoughtof a similar arrangement at the same time, and so the ideabecame known as the Teller-Ulam design. It was successfullytested in 1952 and has been the basis for American hydrogenbombs ever since. Andrei Sakharov had the same idea in1954, and it quickly became the basis for Russian hydrogenbombs too. Many years later Teller and Sakharov met. Theydid not agree about political questions but expressed a deep14 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSrespect for each other. Sakharov remarked in his memoirsthat Teller’s treatment at the hands of his American colleagues was “unfair and even ignoble.”In 1951 Teller returned briefly to his academic life inChicago, but in 1952 he moved permanently to the Livermore laboratory, a brand-new weapons laboratory that hisfriend Ernest Lawrence had organized in California to givesome competition to Los Alamos. He stayed at Livermore for23 years, attracted a brilliant group of young collaborators,and saw the laboratory quickly rise to become an equal partner with Los Alamos in weapons development and in manyother enterprises. Livermore was more adventurous than LosAlamos and more willing to try out crazy ideas. A much largerfraction of Livermore bomb tests failed, but Teller consideredfailed tests a badge of honor rather than a disgrace. In theend the Livermore-designed weapons proved to be as ruggedand reliable as those designed at Los Alamos.Soon after Teller moved to Livermore he was invited totestify at the Oppenheimer security hearings in Washington.At the hearings he was asked whether he considered Oppenheimer to be a security risk, and answered, “Yes.” Forthis the majority of physicists, including many of his friends,never forgave him. The estrangement caused Teller tremendous grief. The community of physicists was split in two, andTeller became a symbol of the division. At the time whenthis happened I was puzzled and shocked by the violence ofthe reaction against Teller. To me it seemed that the mainquestion was whether the security rules should be appliedimpartially to famous people and unknown people alike.It was a question of fairness. If any unknown person hadbehaved as Oppenheimer behaved, telling a lie to a securityofficer about an incident that involved possible spying, hewould certainly have been denied clearance.EDWARD TELLER 15The question was whether Oppenheimer, because hewas famous, should be treated differently. Should there bedifferent rules for peasants and princes? This was a questionconcerning which reasonable people could disagree. I tendedto agree with Teller that the rules ought to be impartial. AndI saw no reason why people who disagreed with him shouldcondemn him for speaking his mind. Teller’s estrangementfrom the community of physicists became worse when threeof his closest friends, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, andErnest Lawrence, happened to die prematurely within a fewyears after the Oppenheimer hearings. Each of them diedin his fifties and should have remained vigorously active forat least another 20 years. The loss of all three made Tellereven more isolated as he started his new life at Livermore.In the summer of 1956 I had one of my happiest experiences, working with Teller on the design of a safe nuclearreactor. Teller’s friend Frederick de Hoffmann, a youngphysicist from Los Alamos, had started a company calledGeneral Atomic in San Diego to manufacture reactorsfor civilian use. Teller and I came for the summer with agroup of physicists and chemists and engineers to help thecompany get started. Teller had been saying for many yearsthat the essential problem for public acceptance of nuclearpower was safety. He proposed that General Atomic shouldstart by building a spectacularly safe reactor. His definitionof safe was that you could give the reactor to a bunch ofchildren to play with and be sure that they would not gethurt. Safety must be guaranteed by the laws of nature andnot by engineered safeguards. For three months Teller andI argued furiously about the design. Every day Teller wouldthink of some brilliant new idea and the rest of us woulddo calculations to show why it would not work. Finally wefound a scheme that worked and used it to design a small16 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSreactor called TRIGA, short for Training, Research, andIsotope-production, General Atomic.The TRIGA was designed, built, licensed, and sold withintwo years. The company sold 75 of them, mostly to hospitalsfor making short-lived isotopes, and they have never run intoany safety problems. Teller and I had hoped that big powerreactors using the TRIGA design could give rise to a nuclearpower industry without safety problems. Unfortunately, thenuclear power industry was stuck with designs borrowedfrom the submarine-propulsion reactor program of AdmiralRickover, and never considered the TRIGA design as a serious competitor. Many years later Teller and his colleaguesat Livermore developed designs for safe nuclear powerreactors that could be buried deep underground, operatedwith a single loading of fuel for 50 years, never refueled,and never unloaded. Teller remained always hopeful thatnuclear power would one day be so safe that the publicwould finally accept it.Teller pushed hard to develop at Livermore other programs besides weapons development. He started a verysuccessful educational program informally known as TellerTech, which brought graduate students to the University ofCalifornia campus at Davis. The students were enrolled in theCollege of Engineering at Davis and received Ph.D. degreesin applied science from Davis, but spent half their time atLivermore. Courses were taught by leading scientists at Davis and at Livermore. Teller enjoyed doing his share of theteaching. Many of the graduates remained at Livermore asmembers of the staff, while others went on to distinguishedcareers in universities and in industry.Roughly one-half of the Livermore budget went intoweapons. In addition, there was a large program to buildcontrolled fusion reactors, both magnetic and inertial.There was a program to develop a supersonic nuclear ram-EDWARD TELLER 17jet that could fly nonstop around the world at low altitude.And there were two projects that were particularly dear toTeller’s heart, the PLOWSHARE program to use nuclearexplosions for peaceful purposes, and the strategic defenseprogram to shoot down enemy missiles using X-ray lasersand brilliant pebbles. The PLOWSHARE program aimedto use nuclear explosions to excavate large masses of dirtor rock cheaply, the main purpose being to create artificialharbors and canals. To minimize the contamination of thelandscape by radioactive fallout, the PLOWSHARE expertsdesigned bombs whose explosive yield came mostly fromfusion and as little as possible from fission. The X-ray laserwas a device that could convert a substantial fraction of theenergy of a fission bomb into a collimated beam of X rays.It was supposed to kill missiles a long way away by firing Xrays at them with extreme accuracy. The brilliant pebble wasa small interceptor rocket that was supposed to kill a missileby direct impact.In the end neither the PLOWSHARE program nor thestrategic defense program fulfilled Teller’s hopes. None ofthe places that were candidates for PLOWSHARE excavations welcomed the idea with enthusiasm. Nobody had anyurgent need for new harbors and canals, and as environmental regulations became more stringent the chance thatany PLOWSHARE project would ever be approved becameincreasingly remote. Livermore’s proposals for strategic defense also ran into difficulties. The X-ray laser was designedto destroy missiles in the boost phase while they were stillaccelerating with rocket power, but the X rays could notpenetrate any considerable depth of atmosphere. As a result,the missiles could defeat the defense by accelerating morerapidly and shortening the boost phase. The brilliant pebbleswere supposed to weigh a couple of pounds and turned outto weigh a couple of hundred pounds. Extravagantly large18 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSnumbers of them would be required to be sure of havingone at the right place and time to intercept a missile. However, the Strategic Defense Initiative that President Reaganstarted in 1983 embodied some of the Livermore proposals,and Teller gave it strong support.After the Strategic Defense Initiative had spent a lot ofmoney and accomplished very little, Teller and I went together to the Pentagon to talk with General Abrahamson,who was then running the program. Teller and I agreed thatstrategic defense was in principle a good idea, and that secrecy was in principle a bad idea. The SDI was a technicallyflawed program whose failures were concealed by excessivesecrecy. Teller and I went to the general to tell him that theonly way to make SDI technically effective was to abolish thesecrecy and bring it out into the open. If the program wereopen, it might receive the expert criticism and the influxof new ideas from the outside that it desperately needed.Teller delivered the message with his usual eloquence, andthe general responded by saying that of course he agreedwith us, and he would be removing the secrecy within a fewweeks. Needless to say, nothing of the kind ever happened.Teller remained publicly supportive of SDI but privatelyfurious at the general for deceiving us.In 1975 Teller retired from Livermore and became asenior fellow at the Hoover Institution on the campus ofStanford University. Here he spent the sunset years of his life,in close touch with the work of the laboratory at Livermore,writing books, and giving lectures, politically active to theend, still fighting for strategic defense and nuclear energy.At the end of his memoirs is a chapter titled “Homecoming,”describing his seven visits to Hungary between 1990 and 1996.In Hungary he felt immediately at home after an absenceof 54 years. He had never stopped speaking Hungarian withhis wife, so that he remained fluent in the language. HeEDWARD TELLER 19was welcomed not only as a national hero but as a long lostbrother. He was as proud of Hungary as Hungary was proudof him. His homecoming gave his life the happy ending thatwas denied to him in America.
At the end of his long life Edward Teller with the helpof his editor Judith Shoolery published his memoirs(2001), a lively and poignant account of his adventuresin science and politics. Hostile reviewers of the memoirspointed out that some details of his stories are inaccurate.But Teller writes in his introduction, “Our memories areselective; they delete some events and magnify others. Justthe simple act of recalling the past affects the recollection ofwhat happened. That some of my remembrances are not thecommonly accepted version of events should not be surprising.” Memoirs are not history. Memoirs are the raw materialfor history. Memoirs written by generals and politicians arenotoriously inaccurate. A writer of memoirs should make anhonest attempt to set down the course of events as they arerecorded in memory. This Teller did. If some of the detailsare wrong, this detracts little from the value of his book asa panorama of a historical epoch in which he played a leading role. I have used the memoirs as the basis for this briefsummary of his career.Teller was born in 1908 into a prosperous middle-classJewish family in Budapest. He lived through the turbulentyears of World War I, the dismemberment of the AustroHungarian Empire, the short-lived Communist regime of Bela B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSKun, and the devastating currency inflation that followed,protected by loving and resourceful parents. All through hislife, from childhood to old age, he had a gift for friendship.His memoirs are full of stories about his friends and the tragicfates that many of them encountered. He cared deeply forthem as individuals and described them with sympatheticunderstanding. He escaped from sharing their fate when heemigrated from Hungary to Germany in 1926, from Germanyto Denmark in 1933, to England in 1934, and to America in1935. He always retained an acute sense of the precariousness of human life and the fragility of political institutions.He was one of the lucky survivors of a great tragedy, whenbarbarians overran Europe and destroyed the world of hischildhood. He saw America as the last refuge, for himselfand for the civilization that he cherished. That was why hesaw it as his inescapable duty to keep America armed withthe most effective weapons, with bombs for deterring attack,and with missiles for active defense.The springtime years of Teller’s professional life, theyears when he was happiest with his work and his friends,were the seven years between 1926 and 1933 that he spentas a student in Germany. His stay in Germany started badly.Riding a trolley car in Munich to meet some friends for ahiking trip, he overshot the meeting place, jumped off themoving trolley car, and fell under the wheels. His rightfoot was chopped in half. As he lay in the road assessingthe damage, he thought how lucky he was not to be one ofthe millions of young men who had lain wounded on themuddy battlefields of World War I a few years earlier. Atleast he was alive, with a clean wound and the certainty ofbeing rescued. The surgeon in Munich reconstructed whatwas left of his foot so that he could still walk on the heel.With the help of a prosthesis he became agile enough to gohiking in the mountains and to play a respectable game ofEDWARD TELLERPing-Pong. He observed that his mother suffered more thanhe did from the accident. As she sat grieving by his bedsideat the hospital, he tried unsuccessfully to cheer her up. Forher it was a deeply tragic event, while for him it was merely anuisance that did not touch the important things in his life.The accident gave him confidence. As he liked to say when Igot to know him 20 years later, if it doesn’t kill you, it makesyou stronger. The accident gave him a good excuse to leaveMunich and go to Leipzig to work with Heisenberg.The years 1926-1933 were the time when German sciencewas blazing with creative activity while the Weimar Republicwas crumbling. When Teller joined the group of young peopleworking at Leipzig with Heisenberg as leader, Heisenbergwas 28. He had invented quantum mechanics in 1925 andthen invited all and sundry to join him in using quantummechanics to understand the workings of nature. Quantummechanics described the behavior of atoms, and so it shouldbe able to explain everything that atoms do. It should bepossible with quantum mechanics to explain all of atomicphysics, most of solid-state physics, most of astrophysics, andall of chemistry. There were enough good problems, so thatevery student could find something important to do. Teller,having been trained as a chemist, chose chemistry as thesubject to be explained with quantum mechanics. He startedwell by beating Heisenberg at Ping-Pong. He and Heisenbergremained friends for life. After World War II, when manyAmerican physicists condemned Heisenberg for staying inGermany through the Hitler years, Teller went out of his wayto befriend him. He knew that Heisenberg had never beena Nazi, and he respected Heisenberg’s decision to stay loyalto his country and share its fate.In Leipzig Teller wrote a Ph. D. thesis (1930) on the hydrogen molecule ion, the simplest of all molecules. He wasable to calculate not only the ground state but also the excitedB IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSquantum states of the molecule, using an old-fashioned mechanical calculator. But he did not enjoy working alone. Hemuch preferred the give-and-take of working together withfriends. Almost all his work after the thesis was done jointlywith others. During his years in Germany he collaboratedfruitfully with Lev Landau, George Placzek, and James Franck,solving various problems on the borderline between physicsand chemistry. As he himself said, he was a problem solverrather than a deep thinker. He enjoyed solving problems,whether or not they were important. The years 1926-1933were harvest time for problem solvers. In those years theproblem solvers laid the foundations for most of modernphysics and chemistry. Teller’s main contributions during thistime were to explain diamagnetism in solids (1931), and toexplain spectra of polyatomic molecules (1933). Both theseproblems required the application of quantum mechanicsto systems involving many electrons.When Hitler took power in 1933, Teller moved to Copenhagen. There he met George Gamow, a young Russian whohad been the first to apply quantum mechanics to nuclearphysics. In 1934 Gamow moved to George Washington University in Washington, D.C, and Teller moved to Londonwith his newly wed wife, Mici. She was a childhood friendfrom Budapest who loved and sustained him through allhis joys and sorrows, and remained by his side for 66 yearsuntil her death in 2000. In 1935 Gamow invited Teller tojoin him at George Washington University, and Mici, whohad spent two years in America as a student, encouragedhim to accept. During the years 1935-1939 that Gamow andTeller were together in Washington, they almost recreatedthe golden age of German physics in America. They foundmany of their European friends already in America, andquickly made new friends among the natives.EDWARD TELLER Gamow was four years younger than Heisenberg andalmost as brilliant. But Gamow had no skill as an organizerand no desire to be a leader like Heisenberg. He producedbrilliant new ideas at a rapid rate, and left it to Teller towork out the details. He also left to Teller the chores ofadministration, organizing meetings, and taking care ofstudents. Teller worked happily with Gamow and also withother collaborators. The most important results of Teller’sresearch during this time were the Gamow-Teller theoryof weak interactions (1936) and the Jahn-Teller theory ofpolyatomic molecules with electrons in degenerate states(1937). The Gamow-Teller theory was in competition withan alternative theory due to Fermi. This was one of the veryfew occasions on which Fermi guessed wrong. The GamowTeller theory was Teller’s first venture into nuclear physics.Twenty years later it became the basis for a unified theoryof weak interactions.One of Teller’s friends in Washington was Merle Tuve,an American and a first-rate physicist who built particle accelerators and used them to do nuclear experiments at theDepartment of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution. Tuve was one of the pioneers of accelerator physics,and made the first accurate measurements of the nuclearinteraction between two protons. After Teller had spent asummer teaching in Chicago, the University of Chicago wasthinking of offering him a permanent job. The Chicagophysicists wrote to Tuve asking for his opinion of Teller. Tuvewrote back, “If you want a genius for your staff, don’t takeTeller, get Gamow. But geniuses are a dime a dozen. Telleris something much better. He helps everybody. He workson everybody’s problem. He never gets into controversiesor has trouble with anyone. He is by far your best choice.”Teller quotes this letter in his memoirs and remarks, “I dobelieve it described me as I was during those happy yearsB IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSin Washington.” He looked back on those years with nostalgia as a time when he could do science with everyone andbe friends with everyone, before the bitter struggles overnuclear politics took him away from science and tore aparthis friendships.The record of Teller’s publications confirms Tuve’s statement. Teller in the first half of his life had an unusual giftfor fruitful collaborations. I have taken 1952 as the pointof division between the two halves of his life. In 1952 hemoved from the University of Chicago to the new weaponslaboratory that he founded at Lawrence Livermore NationalLaboratory in California. That was the year when he stoppedbeing an academic scientist and became a full-time nuclearentrepreneur. In the bibliography of his technical publications there are 146 papers. Before 1952 he wrote 7 papersalone and 77 with collaborators. In that period most of hispapers describe research done with one collaborator. Manyof the leading physicists of that time appear as collaborators. After 1952 he wrote 42 papers alone and 20 with collaborators. In that period most of the papers are reviews orlectures, describing plans for the future or surveys of thepast. The transition from a gregarious to a solitary patternof intellectual life is painfully clear.In January 1939 Gamow and Teller were hosts at themeeting of theoretical physicists, which was held annuallyat George Washington University. That year’s meeting wassupposed to be devoted to low-temperature physics. On thefirst morning of the meeting Gamow introduced Niels Bohr,who had just arrived on a ship from Denmark, and Bohr toldthe assembled physicists the news of the discovery of fissionof uranium in Germany a month before. In the evening ofthe same day Merle Tuve invited everyone to his laboratoryto see a demonstration of the intense bursts of ionizationEDWARD TELLERproduced by uranium fission in a Geiger counter. The ageof nuclear energy had arrived, and Teller was involved in itfrom the first day.In February 1939 Teller’s friend Leo Szilard called himfrom New York to announce that he had found abundantsecondary neutrons emitted in uranium fission. This meantthat an explosive nuclear chain reaction was certainly possible. In March 1939 an informal strategy meeting was held inPrinceton. Present were Bohr, Wheeler, Wigner, Weisskopf,Szilard, and Teller. One American, one Dane, one Austrian,and three Hungarians. Two decisions were made; first tokeep further discoveries about fission secret so far as possible, second to try to bring the situation to the attention ofresponsible people in the American government.In June 1939 Teller moved from Washington to ColumbiaUniversity to help Fermi and Szilard with their project to buildthe first nuclear reactor. In New York a few weeks before theoutbreak of World War II, Heisenberg came to visit Teller.He was on his way back to Germany from a lecture tour inAmerica. He had many offers of jobs in America and couldeasily have stayed. Teller asked him why he was going backto a country that was clearly headed for disaster. Heisenbergreplied, “Even if my brother steals a silver spoon, he is stillmy brother.” Teller understood that nothing he could saywould cause Heisenberg to change his mind.A few days later Szilard, who could not drive a car, cameto see Teller and asked him for a ride. Szilard had written aletter to President Roosevelt informing him of the discoveryof fission and the possibility of nuclear bombs. The letterasked the President to set up a channel of communicationbetween the government and the physicists working onnuclear chain reactions in America. Szilard’s plan was topersuade Einstein to sign the letter. Teller was needed as achauffeur to bring Szilard and the letter to Einstein’s summer10 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRShome on Long Island. Einstein signed the letter, and Szilardsuccessfully delivered it to Roosevelt. As a result, an officialAdvisory Committee on Uranium was established, and thebureaucratic machinery that later grew into the ManhattanProject slowly began to grind.Teller worked on nuclear energy from 1939 to 1945: twoyears at Columbia University helping Fermi design the firstnuclear reactor, two years at the Metallurgical Laboratory inChicago helping to design the Hanford plutonium productionreactors, and two years at Los Alamos National Laboratoryworking on bombs. In all three places he worked on a varietyof projects. His wide knowledge of physics and chemistrymade him useful as a liaison between different parts of theenterprise. The one thing that he could not and would notdo was to sit down and do precise theoretical calculations. Histhesis work, calculating the states of the hydrogen moleculeion, had given him a lifelong distaste for lengthy calculations. At Los Alamos this brought him into collision withHans Bethe, the head of the Theoretical Division, who wasTeller’s boss. Bethe asked him to do a massive calculationof the physics and hydrodynamics of an imploding bomb.Teller refused, saying that if he tried to do such a calculation he would not make any useful contribution to the wareffort. Teller’s friendship with Bethe never recovered fromthis disagreement. Oppenheimer moved Teller out of Bethe’sdivision and made him leader of an independent group.After that, Teller reported directly to Oppenheimer, andOppenheimer kept him busy with a variety of assignmentsmore suited to his temperament. Teller enjoyed working forOppenheimer and considered him an excellent director.During the wartime years Teller worked only intermittently on hydrogen bombs. This work started in the summerof 1942 when Oppenheimer held a meeting in Berkeley toexplore the possibilities. The meeting concluded that if aEDWARD TELLER 11fission bomb could be made to work, it could probably beused to ignite a hydrogen bomb. After the meeting Tellerfound reasons why the ignition would not work. He becameseriously interested in the problem and continued to thinkabout it. During his two years at Los Alamos he spent aboutone-third of his time working on hydrogen bombs. The result of his efforts was a very sketchy design called the Classical Super. The question whether the Classical Super wouldwork could only be decided by massive calculations, usingelectronic computers that did not yet exist. There mattersstood from 1945 to 1950.From 1946 to 1952 Teller was a professor at the University of Chicago. He enjoyed the return to academic lifeand especially enjoyed interacting with a brilliant bunch ofstudents, including Chen Ning Yang, Tsung Dao Lee, Marshall Rosenbluth, and Marvin Goldberger. Two of his closestfriends, Enrico Fermi and Maria Mayer, were colleagues.During these years he worked with Fermi on the capture ofnegative mesons in matter (1947), with Mayer on the originof the chemical elements (1949), and with Robert Richtmyeron the origin of cosmic rays (1949). I met Teller for the firsttime in March 1949 when I gave a colloquium in Chicagowith Fermi and Teller sitting side by side in the front row. Ispoke about the new theories of quantum electrodynamics. Imade some very polite remarks about Schwinger’s theory andthen explained why Feynman’s theory was better. As soon asI finished my talk, Teller asked a question and answered ithimself. “What would you think of a man who cried, ‘Thereis no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,’ andthen at once drank down a great tankard of wine? I wouldconsider him a very sensible fellow.” Afterward I was able tomeet with Teller alone and he talked happily about all thethings he was doing.12 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSI quote now from a letter that I wrote to my parents inEngland, dated March 11, 1949.Teller to me has always been an enigma. He has done all kinds of interesting things in physics, but never the same thing for long, and he seems todo physics for fun rather than for glory. However, during the last few yearsthere have been reports that he has been engaged in perfecting the mostfiendish engines of destruction; and I have always wondered how such a mancould do such things. In Chicago I found without difficulty the answer. Istarted a long argument with him about political questions, and it appearsthat he is an ardent supporter of the ‘World Government’ movement, anorganization which preaches salvation in the form of a world government,to be set up in the near future with or without Russia, and to have sovereignpowers over the economic and social policies of its member nations. Tellerevidently finds this faith soothing to his conscience; he preaches it withgreat charm and intelligence; all the same, I feel that he is a good exampleof the saying that no man is so dangerous as an idealist.In the same letter there is a passage describing the community of physicists in Chicago.The most striking thing about all these people, and also their wives whom Imet as I went from house to house and from family to family, is how happythey seem to be. All of them say they have never found any place on earthso pleasant to be in as Chicago. There seems to be an exceptionally freeand easy atmosphere, rather like Cornell, and with the added advantagesof a metropolitan city.These were the golden years of physics in Chicago,when Fermi was king and Teller was his court jester. Tellerenjoyed those years to the full. But during those same yearshe could not stop thinking about the question that he hadleft unanswered when he left Los Alamos in 1946. Could ahydrogen bomb be made to work? In June 1949 he returnedto Los Alamos to continue his lonely effort to understandwhat Nature allows us to do. In August the first Russiannuclear bomb was tested, and in January 1950 PresidentTruman announced that work on the “so-called hydrogenor super bomb” would continue. After the President’sEDWARD TELLER 13announcement Teller wrote to Maria Mayer from Los Alamos.“Whatever help and whatever advice I can get from you—Ineed it. Not because I feel subjectively that I must have help,but because I know objectively that we are in a situation inwhich any sane person must and does throw up his handsand only the crazy ones keep going.”In 1950 electronic computers were able to simulate ina rough fashion the Classical Super design for a hydrogenbomb and showed that it did not work. George Gamow drewa famous cartoon of Teller trying to set fire to a wet piece ofrock with a match. But to Teller the downfall of the ClassicalSuper came as a liberation. For eight years his thoughts hadbeen fixed on the Classical Super, which required deuteriumto burn at low density, so that radiation could escape fromthe burning region and not come to thermal equilibriumwith the matter. The idea was to achieve a runaway burn,with the temperature of the matter remaining much higherthan the temperature of the radiation. The computers showedthat runaway burn did not work. So Teller started to lookseriously at the opposite situation, with deuterium at highdensity and the radiation trapped in thermal equilibriumwith the matter.Teller quickly found that at high density, deuterium couldburn well in thermal equilibrium. From that point it was ashort step to design an arrangement by which a fission bombcould compress deuterium to high density and then igniteit. Teller’s colleague Stanislas Ulam at Los Alamos thoughtof a similar arrangement at the same time, and so the ideabecame known as the Teller-Ulam design. It was successfullytested in 1952 and has been the basis for American hydrogenbombs ever since. Andrei Sakharov had the same idea in1954, and it quickly became the basis for Russian hydrogenbombs too. Many years later Teller and Sakharov met. Theydid not agree about political questions but expressed a deep14 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSrespect for each other. Sakharov remarked in his memoirsthat Teller’s treatment at the hands of his American colleagues was “unfair and even ignoble.”In 1951 Teller returned briefly to his academic life inChicago, but in 1952 he moved permanently to the Livermore laboratory, a brand-new weapons laboratory that hisfriend Ernest Lawrence had organized in California to givesome competition to Los Alamos. He stayed at Livermore for23 years, attracted a brilliant group of young collaborators,and saw the laboratory quickly rise to become an equal partner with Los Alamos in weapons development and in manyother enterprises. Livermore was more adventurous than LosAlamos and more willing to try out crazy ideas. A much largerfraction of Livermore bomb tests failed, but Teller consideredfailed tests a badge of honor rather than a disgrace. In theend the Livermore-designed weapons proved to be as ruggedand reliable as those designed at Los Alamos.Soon after Teller moved to Livermore he was invited totestify at the Oppenheimer security hearings in Washington.At the hearings he was asked whether he considered Oppenheimer to be a security risk, and answered, “Yes.” Forthis the majority of physicists, including many of his friends,never forgave him. The estrangement caused Teller tremendous grief. The community of physicists was split in two, andTeller became a symbol of the division. At the time whenthis happened I was puzzled and shocked by the violence ofthe reaction against Teller. To me it seemed that the mainquestion was whether the security rules should be appliedimpartially to famous people and unknown people alike.It was a question of fairness. If any unknown person hadbehaved as Oppenheimer behaved, telling a lie to a securityofficer about an incident that involved possible spying, hewould certainly have been denied clearance.EDWARD TELLER 15The question was whether Oppenheimer, because hewas famous, should be treated differently. Should there bedifferent rules for peasants and princes? This was a questionconcerning which reasonable people could disagree. I tendedto agree with Teller that the rules ought to be impartial. AndI saw no reason why people who disagreed with him shouldcondemn him for speaking his mind. Teller’s estrangementfrom the community of physicists became worse when threeof his closest friends, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, andErnest Lawrence, happened to die prematurely within a fewyears after the Oppenheimer hearings. Each of them diedin his fifties and should have remained vigorously active forat least another 20 years. The loss of all three made Tellereven more isolated as he started his new life at Livermore.In the summer of 1956 I had one of my happiest experiences, working with Teller on the design of a safe nuclearreactor. Teller’s friend Frederick de Hoffmann, a youngphysicist from Los Alamos, had started a company calledGeneral Atomic in San Diego to manufacture reactorsfor civilian use. Teller and I came for the summer with agroup of physicists and chemists and engineers to help thecompany get started. Teller had been saying for many yearsthat the essential problem for public acceptance of nuclearpower was safety. He proposed that General Atomic shouldstart by building a spectacularly safe reactor. His definitionof safe was that you could give the reactor to a bunch ofchildren to play with and be sure that they would not gethurt. Safety must be guaranteed by the laws of nature andnot by engineered safeguards. For three months Teller andI argued furiously about the design. Every day Teller wouldthink of some brilliant new idea and the rest of us woulddo calculations to show why it would not work. Finally wefound a scheme that worked and used it to design a small16 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSreactor called TRIGA, short for Training, Research, andIsotope-production, General Atomic.The TRIGA was designed, built, licensed, and sold withintwo years. The company sold 75 of them, mostly to hospitalsfor making short-lived isotopes, and they have never run intoany safety problems. Teller and I had hoped that big powerreactors using the TRIGA design could give rise to a nuclearpower industry without safety problems. Unfortunately, thenuclear power industry was stuck with designs borrowedfrom the submarine-propulsion reactor program of AdmiralRickover, and never considered the TRIGA design as a serious competitor. Many years later Teller and his colleaguesat Livermore developed designs for safe nuclear powerreactors that could be buried deep underground, operatedwith a single loading of fuel for 50 years, never refueled,and never unloaded. Teller remained always hopeful thatnuclear power would one day be so safe that the publicwould finally accept it.Teller pushed hard to develop at Livermore other programs besides weapons development. He started a verysuccessful educational program informally known as TellerTech, which brought graduate students to the University ofCalifornia campus at Davis. The students were enrolled in theCollege of Engineering at Davis and received Ph.D. degreesin applied science from Davis, but spent half their time atLivermore. Courses were taught by leading scientists at Davis and at Livermore. Teller enjoyed doing his share of theteaching. Many of the graduates remained at Livermore asmembers of the staff, while others went on to distinguishedcareers in universities and in industry.Roughly one-half of the Livermore budget went intoweapons. In addition, there was a large program to buildcontrolled fusion reactors, both magnetic and inertial.There was a program to develop a supersonic nuclear ram-EDWARD TELLER 17jet that could fly nonstop around the world at low altitude.And there were two projects that were particularly dear toTeller’s heart, the PLOWSHARE program to use nuclearexplosions for peaceful purposes, and the strategic defenseprogram to shoot down enemy missiles using X-ray lasersand brilliant pebbles. The PLOWSHARE program aimedto use nuclear explosions to excavate large masses of dirtor rock cheaply, the main purpose being to create artificialharbors and canals. To minimize the contamination of thelandscape by radioactive fallout, the PLOWSHARE expertsdesigned bombs whose explosive yield came mostly fromfusion and as little as possible from fission. The X-ray laserwas a device that could convert a substantial fraction of theenergy of a fission bomb into a collimated beam of X rays.It was supposed to kill missiles a long way away by firing Xrays at them with extreme accuracy. The brilliant pebble wasa small interceptor rocket that was supposed to kill a missileby direct impact.In the end neither the PLOWSHARE program nor thestrategic defense program fulfilled Teller’s hopes. None ofthe places that were candidates for PLOWSHARE excavations welcomed the idea with enthusiasm. Nobody had anyurgent need for new harbors and canals, and as environmental regulations became more stringent the chance thatany PLOWSHARE project would ever be approved becameincreasingly remote. Livermore’s proposals for strategic defense also ran into difficulties. The X-ray laser was designedto destroy missiles in the boost phase while they were stillaccelerating with rocket power, but the X rays could notpenetrate any considerable depth of atmosphere. As a result,the missiles could defeat the defense by accelerating morerapidly and shortening the boost phase. The brilliant pebbleswere supposed to weigh a couple of pounds and turned outto weigh a couple of hundred pounds. Extravagantly large18 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSnumbers of them would be required to be sure of havingone at the right place and time to intercept a missile. However, the Strategic Defense Initiative that President Reaganstarted in 1983 embodied some of the Livermore proposals,and Teller gave it strong support.After the Strategic Defense Initiative had spent a lot ofmoney and accomplished very little, Teller and I went together to the Pentagon to talk with General Abrahamson,who was then running the program. Teller and I agreed thatstrategic defense was in principle a good idea, and that secrecy was in principle a bad idea. The SDI was a technicallyflawed program whose failures were concealed by excessivesecrecy. Teller and I went to the general to tell him that theonly way to make SDI technically effective was to abolish thesecrecy and bring it out into the open. If the program wereopen, it might receive the expert criticism and the influxof new ideas from the outside that it desperately needed.Teller delivered the message with his usual eloquence, andthe general responded by saying that of course he agreedwith us, and he would be removing the secrecy within a fewweeks. Needless to say, nothing of the kind ever happened.Teller remained publicly supportive of SDI but privatelyfurious at the general for deceiving us.In 1975 Teller retired from Livermore and became asenior fellow at the Hoover Institution on the campus ofStanford University. Here he spent the sunset years of his life,in close touch with the work of the laboratory at Livermore,writing books, and giving lectures, politically active to theend, still fighting for strategic defense and nuclear energy.At the end of his memoirs is a chapter titled “Homecoming,”describing his seven visits to Hungary between 1990 and 1996.In Hungary he felt immediately at home after an absenceof 54 years. He had never stopped speaking Hungarian withhis wife, so that he remained fluent in the language. HeEDWARD TELLER 19was welcomed not only as a national hero but as a long lostbrother. He was as proud of Hungary as Hungary was proudof him. His homecoming gave his life the happy ending thatwas denied to him in America.20 B IO G RA P H ICAL MAt the end of his long life Edward Teller with the helpof his editor Judith Shoolery published his memoirs(2001), a lively and poignant account of his adventuresin science and politics. Hostile reviewers of the memoirspointed out that some details of his stories are inaccurate.But Teller writes in his introduction, “Our memories areselective; they delete some events and magnify others. Justthe simple act of recalling the past affects the recollection ofwhat happened. That some of my remembrances are not thecommonly accepted version of events should not be surprising.” Memoirs are not history. Memoirs are the raw materialfor history. Memoirs written by generals and politicians arenotoriously inaccurate. A writer of memoirs should make anhonest attempt to set down the course of events as they arerecorded in memory. This Teller did. If some of the detailsare wrong, this detracts little from the value of his book asa panorama of a historical epoch in which he played a leading role. I have used the memoirs as the basis for this briefsummary of his career.Teller was born in 1908 into a prosperous middle-classJewish family in Budapest. He lived through the turbulentyears of World War I, the dismemberment of the AustroHungarian Empire, the short-lived Communist regime of Bela B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSKun, and the devastating currency inflation that followed,protected by loving and resourceful parents. All through hislife, from childhood to old age, he had a gift for friendship.His memoirs are full of stories about his friends and the tragicfates that many of them encountered. He cared deeply forthem as individuals and described them with sympatheticunderstanding. He escaped from sharing their fate when heemigrated from Hungary to Germany in 1926, from Germanyto Denmark in 1933, to England in 1934, and to America in1935. He always retained an acute sense of the precariousness of human life and the fragility of political institutions.He was one of the lucky survivors of a great tragedy, whenbarbarians overran Europe and destroyed the world of hischildhood. He saw America as the last refuge, for himselfand for the civilization that he cherished. That was why hesaw it as his inescapable duty to keep America armed withthe most effective weapons, with bombs for deterring attack,and with missiles for active defense.The springtime years of Teller’s professional life, theyears when he was happiest with his work and his friends,were the seven years between 1926 and 1933 that he spentas a student in Germany. His stay in Germany started badly.Riding a trolley car in Munich to meet some friends for ahiking trip, he overshot the meeting place, jumped off themoving trolley car, and fell under the wheels. His rightfoot was chopped in half. As he lay in the road assessingthe damage, he thought how lucky he was not to be one ofthe millions of young men who had lain wounded on themuddy battlefields of World War I a few years earlier. Atleast he was alive, with a clean wound and the certainty ofbeing rescued. The surgeon in Munich reconstructed whatwas left of his foot so that he could still walk on the heel.With the help of a prosthesis he became agile enough to gohiking in the mountains and to play a respectable game ofEDWARD TELLERPing-Pong. He observed that his mother suffered more thanhe did from the accident. As she sat grieving by his bedsideat the hospital, he tried unsuccessfully to cheer her up. Forher it was a deeply tragic event, while for him it was merely anuisance that did not touch the important things in his life.The accident gave him confidence. As he liked to say when Igot to know him 20 years later, if it doesn’t kill you, it makesyou stronger. The accident gave him a good excuse to leaveMunich and go to Leipzig to work with Heisenberg.The years 1926-1933 were the time when German sciencewas blazing with creative activity while the Weimar Republicwas crumbling. When Teller joined the group of young peopleworking at Leipzig with Heisenberg as leader, Heisenbergwas 28. He had invented quantum mechanics in 1925 andthen invited all and sundry to join him in using quantummechanics to understand the workings of nature. Quantummechanics described the behavior of atoms, and so it shouldbe able to explain everything that atoms do. It should bepossible with quantum mechanics to explain all of atomicphysics, most of solid-state physics, most of astrophysics, andall of chemistry. There were enough good problems, so thatevery student could find something important to do. Teller,having been trained as a chemist, chose chemistry as thesubject to be explained with quantum mechanics. He startedwell by beating Heisenberg at Ping-Pong. He and Heisenbergremained friends for life. After World War II, when manyAmerican physicists condemned Heisenberg for staying inGermany through the Hitler years, Teller went out of his wayto befriend him. He knew that Heisenberg had never beena Nazi, and he respected Heisenberg’s decision to stay loyalto his country and share its fate.In Leipzig Teller wrote a Ph. D. thesis (1930) on the hydrogen molecule ion, the simplest of all molecules. He wasable to calculate not only the ground state but also the excitedB IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSquantum states of the molecule, using an old-fashioned mechanical calculator. But he did not enjoy working alone. Hemuch preferred the give-and-take of working together withfriends. Almost all his work after the thesis was done jointlywith others. During his years in Germany he collaboratedfruitfully with Lev Landau, George Placzek, and James Franck,solving various problems on the borderline between physicsand chemistry. As he himself said, he was a problem solverrather than a deep thinker. He enjoyed solving problems,whether or not they were important. The years 1926-1933were harvest time for problem solvers. In those years theproblem solvers laid the foundations for most of modernphysics and chemistry. Teller’s main contributions during thistime were to explain diamagnetism in solids (1931), and toexplain spectra of polyatomic molecules (1933). Both theseproblems required the application of quantum mechanicsto systems involving many electrons.When Hitler took power in 1933, Teller moved to Copenhagen. There he met George Gamow, a young Russian whohad been the first to apply quantum mechanics to nuclearphysics. In 1934 Gamow moved to George Washington University in Washington, D.C, and Teller moved to Londonwith his newly wed wife, Mici. She was a childhood friendfrom Budapest who loved and sustained him through allhis joys and sorrows, and remained by his side for 66 yearsuntil her death in 2000. In 1935 Gamow invited Teller tojoin him at George Washington University, and Mici, whohad spent two years in America as a student, encouragedhim to accept. During the years 1935-1939 that Gamow andTeller were together in Washington, they almost recreatedthe golden age of German physics in America. They foundmany of their European friends already in America, andquickly made new friends among the natives.EDWARD TELLER Gamow was four years younger than Heisenberg andalmost as brilliant. But Gamow had no skill as an organizerand no desire to be a leader like Heisenberg. He producedbrilliant new ideas at a rapid rate, and left it to Teller towork out the details. He also left to Teller the chores ofadministration, organizing meetings, and taking care ofstudents. Teller worked happily with Gamow and also withother collaborators. The most important results of Teller’sresearch during this time were the Gamow-Teller theoryof weak interactions (1936) and the Jahn-Teller theory ofpolyatomic molecules with electrons in degenerate states(1937). The Gamow-Teller theory was in competition withan alternative theory due to Fermi. This was one of the veryfew occasions on which Fermi guessed wrong. The GamowTeller theory was Teller’s first venture into nuclear physics.Twenty years later it became the basis for a unified theoryof weak interactions.One of Teller’s friends in Washington was Merle Tuve,an American and a first-rate physicist who built particle accelerators and used them to do nuclear experiments at theDepartment of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution. Tuve was one of the pioneers of accelerator physics,and made the first accurate measurements of the nuclearinteraction between two protons. After Teller had spent asummer teaching in Chicago, the University of Chicago wasthinking of offering him a permanent job. The Chicagophysicists wrote to Tuve asking for his opinion of Teller. Tuvewrote back, “If you want a genius for your staff, don’t takeTeller, get Gamow. But geniuses are a dime a dozen. Telleris something much better. He helps everybody. He workson everybody’s problem. He never gets into controversiesor has trouble with anyone. He is by far your best choice.”Teller quotes this letter in his memoirs and remarks, “I dobelieve it described me as I was during those happy yearsB IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSin Washington.” He looked back on those years with nostalgia as a time when he could do science with everyone andbe friends with everyone, before the bitter struggles overnuclear politics took him away from science and tore aparthis friendships.The record of Teller’s publications confirms Tuve’s statement. Teller in the first half of his life had an unusual giftfor fruitful collaborations. I have taken 1952 as the pointof division between the two halves of his life. In 1952 hemoved from the University of Chicago to the new weaponslaboratory that he founded at Lawrence Livermore NationalLaboratory in California. That was the year when he stoppedbeing an academic scientist and became a full-time nuclearentrepreneur. In the bibliography of his technical publications there are 146 papers. Before 1952 he wrote 7 papersalone and 77 with collaborators. In that period most of hispapers describe research done with one collaborator. Manyof the leading physicists of that time appear as collaborators. After 1952 he wrote 42 papers alone and 20 with collaborators. In that period most of the papers are reviews orlectures, describing plans for the future or surveys of thepast. The transition from a gregarious to a solitary patternof intellectual life is painfully clear.In January 1939 Gamow and Teller were hosts at themeeting of theoretical physicists, which was held annuallyat George Washington University. That year’s meeting wassupposed to be devoted to low-temperature physics. On thefirst morning of the meeting Gamow introduced Niels Bohr,who had just arrived on a ship from Denmark, and Bohr toldthe assembled physicists the news of the discovery of fissionof uranium in Germany a month before. In the evening ofthe same day Merle Tuve invited everyone to his laboratoryto see a demonstration of the intense bursts of ionizationEDWARD TELLERproduced by uranium fission in a Geiger counter. The ageof nuclear energy had arrived, and Teller was involved in itfrom the first day.In February 1939 Teller’s friend Leo Szilard called himfrom New York to announce that he had found abundantsecondary neutrons emitted in uranium fission. This meantthat an explosive nuclear chain reaction was certainly possible. In March 1939 an informal strategy meeting was held inPrinceton. Present were Bohr, Wheeler, Wigner, Weisskopf,Szilard, and Teller. One American, one Dane, one Austrian,and three Hungarians. Two decisions were made; first tokeep further discoveries about fission secret so far as possible, second to try to bring the situation to the attention ofresponsible people in the American government.In June 1939 Teller moved from Washington to ColumbiaUniversity to help Fermi and Szilard with their project to buildthe first nuclear reactor. In New York a few weeks before theoutbreak of World War II, Heisenberg came to visit Teller.He was on his way back to Germany from a lecture tour inAmerica. He had many offers of jobs in America and couldeasily have stayed. Teller asked him why he was going backto a country that was clearly headed for disaster. Heisenbergreplied, “Even if my brother steals a silver spoon, he is stillmy brother.” Teller understood that nothing he could saywould cause Heisenberg to change his mind.A few days later Szilard, who could not drive a car, cameto see Teller and asked him for a ride. Szilard had written aletter to President Roosevelt informing him of the discoveryof fission and the possibility of nuclear bombs. The letterasked the President to set up a channel of communicationbetween the government and the physicists working onnuclear chain reactions in America. Szilard’s plan was topersuade Einstein to sign the letter. Teller was needed as achauffeur to bring Szilard and the letter to Einstein’s summer10 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRShome on Long Island. Einstein signed the letter, and Szilardsuccessfully delivered it to Roosevelt. As a result, an officialAdvisory Committee on Uranium was established, and thebureaucratic machinery that later grew into the ManhattanProject slowly began to grind.Teller worked on nuclear energy from 1939 to 1945: twoyears at Columbia University helping Fermi design the firstnuclear reactor, two years at the Metallurgical Laboratory inChicago helping to design the Hanford plutonium productionreactors, and two years at Los Alamos National Laboratoryworking on bombs. In all three places he worked on a varietyof projects. His wide knowledge of physics and chemistrymade him useful as a liaison between different parts of theenterprise. The one thing that he could not and would notdo was to sit down and do precise theoretical calculations. Histhesis work, calculating the states of the hydrogen moleculeion, had given him a lifelong distaste for lengthy calculations. At Los Alamos this brought him into collision withHans Bethe, the head of the Theoretical Division, who wasTeller’s boss. Bethe asked him to do a massive calculationof the physics and hydrodynamics of an imploding bomb.Teller refused, saying that if he tried to do such a calculation he would not make any useful contribution to the wareffort. Teller’s friendship with Bethe never recovered fromthis disagreement. Oppenheimer moved Teller out of Bethe’sdivision and made him leader of an independent group.After that, Teller reported directly to Oppenheimer, andOppenheimer kept him busy with a variety of assignmentsmore suited to his temperament. Teller enjoyed working forOppenheimer and considered him an excellent director.During the wartime years Teller worked only intermittently on hydrogen bombs. This work started in the summerof 1942 when Oppenheimer held a meeting in Berkeley toexplore the possibilities. The meeting concluded that if aEDWARD TELLER 11fission bomb could be made to work, it could probably beused to ignite a hydrogen bomb. After the meeting Tellerfound reasons why the ignition would not work. He becameseriously interested in the problem and continued to thinkabout it. During his two years at Los Alamos he spent aboutone-third of his time working on hydrogen bombs. The result of his efforts was a very sketchy design called the Classical Super. The question whether the Classical Super wouldwork could only be decided by massive calculations, usingelectronic computers that did not yet exist. There mattersstood from 1945 to 1950.From 1946 to 1952 Teller was a professor at the University of Chicago. He enjoyed the return to academic lifeand especially enjoyed interacting with a brilliant bunch ofstudents, including Chen Ning Yang, Tsung Dao Lee, Marshall Rosenbluth, and Marvin Goldberger. Two of his closestfriends, Enrico Fermi and Maria Mayer, were colleagues.During these years he worked with Fermi on the capture ofnegative mesons in matter (1947), with Mayer on the originof the chemical elements (1949), and with Robert Richtmyeron the origin of cosmic rays (1949). I met Teller for the firsttime in March 1949 when I gave a colloquium in Chicagowith Fermi and Teller sitting side by side in the front row. Ispoke about the new theories of quantum electrodynamics. Imade some very polite remarks about Schwinger’s theory andthen explained why Feynman’s theory was better. As soon asI finished my talk, Teller asked a question and answered ithimself. “What would you think of a man who cried, ‘Thereis no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,’ andthen at once drank down a great tankard of wine? I wouldconsider him a very sensible fellow.” Afterward I was able tomeet with Teller alone and he talked happily about all thethings he was doing.12 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSI quote now from a letter that I wrote to my parents inEngland, dated March 11, 1949.Teller to me has always been an enigma. He has done all kinds of interesting things in physics, but never the same thing for long, and he seems todo physics for fun rather than for glory. However, during the last few yearsthere have been reports that he has been engaged in perfecting the mostfiendish engines of destruction; and I have always wondered how such a mancould do such things. In Chicago I found without difficulty the answer. Istarted a long argument with him about political questions, and it appearsthat he is an ardent supporter of the ‘World Government’ movement, anorganization which preaches salvation in the form of a world government,to be set up in the near future with or without Russia, and to have sovereignpowers over the economic and social policies of its member nations. Tellerevidently finds this faith soothing to his conscience; he preaches it withgreat charm and intelligence; all the same, I feel that he is a good exampleof the saying that no man is so dangerous as an idealist.In the same letter there is a passage describing the community of physicists in Chicago.The most striking thing about all these people, and also their wives whom Imet as I went from house to house and from family to family, is how happythey seem to be. All of them say they have never found any place on earthso pleasant to be in as Chicago. There seems to be an exceptionally freeand easy atmosphere, rather like Cornell, and with the added advantagesof a metropolitan city.These were the golden years of physics in Chicago,when Fermi was king and Teller was his court jester. Tellerenjoyed those years to the full. But during those same yearshe could not stop thinking about the question that he hadleft unanswered when he left Los Alamos in 1946. Could ahydrogen bomb be made to work? In June 1949 he returnedto Los Alamos to continue his lonely effort to understandwhat Nature allows us to do. In August the first Russiannuclear bomb was tested, and in January 1950 PresidentTruman announced that work on the “so-called hydrogenor super bomb” would continue. After the President’sEDWARD TELLER 13announcement Teller wrote to Maria Mayer from Los Alamos.“Whatever help and whatever advice I can get from you—Ineed it. Not because I feel subjectively that I must have help,but because I know objectively that we are in a situation inwhich any sane person must and does throw up his handsand only the crazy ones keep going.”In 1950 electronic computers were able to simulate ina rough fashion the Classical Super design for a hydrogenbomb and showed that it did not work. George Gamow drewa famous cartoon of Teller trying to set fire to a wet piece ofrock with a match. But to Teller the downfall of the ClassicalSuper came as a liberation. For eight years his thoughts hadbeen fixed on the Classical Super, which required deuteriumto burn at low density, so that radiation could escape fromthe burning region and not come to thermal equilibriumwith the matter. The idea was to achieve a runaway burn,with the temperature of the matter remaining much higherthan the temperature of the radiation. The computers showedthat runaway burn did not work. So Teller started to lookseriously at the opposite situation, with deuterium at highdensity and the radiation trapped in thermal equilibriumwith the matter.Teller quickly found that at high density, deuterium couldburn well in thermal equilibrium. From that point it was ashort step to design an arrangement by which a fission bombcould compress deuterium to high density and then igniteit. Teller’s colleague Stanislas Ulam at Los Alamos thoughtof a similar arrangement at the same time, and so the ideabecame known as the Teller-Ulam design. It was successfullytested in 1952 and has been the basis for American hydrogenbombs ever since. Andrei Sakharov had the same idea in1954, and it quickly became the basis for Russian hydrogenbombs too. Many years later Teller and Sakharov met. Theydid not agree about political questions but expressed a deep14 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSrespect for each other. Sakharov remarked in his memoirsthat Teller’s treatment at the hands of his American colleagues was “unfair and even ignoble.”In 1951 Teller returned briefly to his academic life inChicago, but in 1952 he moved permanently to the Livermore laboratory, a brand-new weapons laboratory that hisfriend Ernest Lawrence had organized in California to givesome competition to Los Alamos. He stayed at Livermore for23 years, attracted a brilliant group of young collaborators,and saw the laboratory quickly rise to become an equal partner with Los Alamos in weapons development and in manyother enterprises. Livermore was more adventurous than LosAlamos and more willing to try out crazy ideas. A much largerfraction of Livermore bomb tests failed, but Teller consideredfailed tests a badge of honor rather than a disgrace. In theend the Livermore-designed weapons proved to be as ruggedand reliable as those designed at Los Alamos.Soon after Teller moved to Livermore he was invited totestify at the Oppenheimer security hearings in Washington.At the hearings he was asked whether he considered Oppenheimer to be a security risk, and answered, “Yes.” Forthis the majority of physicists, including many of his friends,never forgave him. The estrangement caused Teller tremendous grief. The community of physicists was split in two, andTeller became a symbol of the division. At the time whenthis happened I was puzzled and shocked by the violence ofthe reaction against Teller. To me it seemed that the mainquestion was whether the security rules should be appliedimpartially to famous people and unknown people alike.It was a question of fairness. If any unknown person hadbehaved as Oppenheimer behaved, telling a lie to a securityofficer about an incident that involved possible spying, hewould certainly have been denied clearance.EDWARD TELLER 15The question was whether Oppenheimer, because hewas famous, should be treated differently. Should there bedifferent rules for peasants and princes? This was a questionconcerning which reasonable people could disagree. I tendedto agree with Teller that the rules ought to be impartial. AndI saw no reason why people who disagreed with him shouldcondemn him for speaking his mind. Teller’s estrangementfrom the community of physicists became worse when threeof his closest friends, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, andErnest Lawrence, happened to die prematurely within a fewyears after the Oppenheimer hearings. Each of them diedin his fifties and should have remained vigorously active forat least another 20 years. The loss of all three made Tellereven more isolated as he started his new life at Livermore.In the summer of 1956 I had one of my happiest experiences, working with Teller on the design of a safe nuclearreactor. Teller’s friend Frederick de Hoffmann, a youngphysicist from Los Alamos, had started a company calledGeneral Atomic in San Diego to manufacture reactorsfor civilian use. Teller and I came for the summer with agroup of physicists and chemists and engineers to help thecompany get started. Teller had been saying for many yearsthat the essential problem for public acceptance of nuclearpower was safety. He proposed that General Atomic shouldstart by building a spectacularly safe reactor. His definitionof safe was that you could give the reactor to a bunch ofchildren to play with and be sure that they would not gethurt. Safety must be guaranteed by the laws of nature andnot by engineered safeguards. For three months Teller andI argued furiously about the design. Every day Teller wouldthink of some brilliant new idea and the rest of us woulddo calculations to show why it would not work. Finally wefound a scheme that worked and used it to design a small16 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSreactor called TRIGA, short for Training, Research, andIsotope-production, General Atomic.The TRIGA was designed, built, licensed, and sold withintwo years. The company sold 75 of them, mostly to hospitalsfor making short-lived isotopes, and they have never run intoany safety problems. Teller and I had hoped that big powerreactors using the TRIGA design could give rise to a nuclearpower industry without safety problems. Unfortunately, thenuclear power industry was stuck with designs borrowedfrom the submarine-propulsion reactor program of AdmiralRickover, and never considered the TRIGA design as a serious competitor. Many years later Teller and his colleaguesat Livermore developed designs for safe nuclear powerreactors that could be buried deep underground, operatedwith a single loading of fuel for 50 years, never refueled,and never unloaded. Teller remained always hopeful thatnuclear power would one day be so safe that the publicwould finally accept it.Teller pushed hard to develop at Livermore other programs besides weapons development. He started a verysuccessful educational program informally known as TellerTech, which brought graduate students to the University ofCalifornia campus at Davis. The students were enrolled in theCollege of Engineering at Davis and received Ph.D. degreesin applied science from Davis, but spent half their time atLivermore. Courses were taught by leading scientists at Davis and at Livermore. Teller enjoyed doing his share of theteaching. Many of the graduates remained at Livermore asmembers of the staff, while others went on to distinguishedcareers in universities and in industry.Roughly one-half of the Livermore budget went intoweapons. In addition, there was a large program to buildcontrolled fusion reactors, both magnetic and inertial.There was a program to develop a supersonic nuclear ram-EDWARD TELLER 17jet that could fly nonstop around the world at low altitude.And there were two projects that were particularly dear toTeller’s heart, the PLOWSHARE program to use nuclearexplosions for peaceful purposes, and the strategic defenseprogram to shoot down enemy missiles using X-ray lasersand brilliant pebbles. The PLOWSHARE program aimedto use nuclear explosions to excavate large masses of dirtor rock cheaply, the main purpose being to create artificialharbors and canals. To minimize the contamination of thelandscape by radioactive fallout, the PLOWSHARE expertsdesigned bombs whose explosive yield came mostly fromfusion and as little as possible from fission. The X-ray laserwas a device that could convert a substantial fraction of theenergy of a fission bomb into a collimated beam of X rays.It was supposed to kill missiles a long way away by firing Xrays at them with extreme accuracy. The brilliant pebble wasa small interceptor rocket that was supposed to kill a missileby direct impact.In the end neither the PLOWSHARE program nor thestrategic defense program fulfilled Teller’s hopes. None ofthe places that were candidates for PLOWSHARE excavations welcomed the idea with enthusiasm. Nobody had anyurgent need for new harbors and canals, and as environmental regulations became more stringent the chance thatany PLOWSHARE project would ever be approved becameincreasingly remote. Livermore’s proposals for strategic defense also ran into difficulties. The X-ray laser was designedto destroy missiles in the boost phase while they were stillaccelerating with rocket power, but the X rays could notpenetrate any considerable depth of atmosphere. As a result,the missiles could defeat the defense by accelerating morerapidly and shortening the boost phase. The brilliant pebbleswere supposed to weigh a couple of pounds and turned outto weigh a couple of hundred pounds. Extravagantly large18 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRSnumbers of them would be required to be sure of havingone at the right place and time to intercept a missile. However, the Strategic Defense Initiative that President Reaganstarted in 1983 embodied some of the Livermore proposals,and Teller gave it strong support.After the Strategic Defense Initiative had spent a lot ofmoney and accomplished very little, Teller and I went together to the Pentagon to talk with General Abrahamson,who was then running the program. Teller and I agreed thatstrategic defense was in principle a good idea, and that secrecy was in principle a bad idea. The SDI was a technicallyflawed program whose failures were concealed by excessivesecrecy. Teller and I went to the general to tell him that theonly way to make SDI technically effective was to abolish thesecrecy and bring it out into the open. If the program wereopen, it might receive the expert criticism and the influxof new ideas from the outside that it desperately needed.Teller delivered the message with his usual eloquence, andthe general responded by saying that of course he agreedwith us, and he would be removing the secrecy within a fewweeks. Needless to say, nothing of the kind ever happened.Teller remained publicly supportive of SDI but privatelyfurious at the general for deceiving us.In 1975 Teller retired from Livermore and became asenior fellow at the Hoover Institution on the campus ofStanford University. Here he spent the sunset years of his life,in close touch with the work of the laboratory at Livermore,writing books, and giving lectures, politically active to theend, still fighting for strategic defense and nuclear energy.At the end of his memoirs is a chapter titled “Homecoming,”describing his seven visits to Hungary between 1990 and 1996.In Hungary he felt immediately at home after an absenceof 54 years. He had never stopped speaking Hungarian withhis wife, so that he remained fluent in the language. HeEDWARD TELLER 19was welcomed not only as a national hero but as a long lostbrother. He was as proud of Hungary as Hungary was proudof him. His homecoming gave his life the happy ending thatwas denied to him in America.At the end of his long life Edward Teller with the help of his editor Judith Shoolery published his memoirs (2001), a lively and poignant account of his adventures in science and politics. Hostile reviewers of the memoirs pointed out that some details of his stories are inaccurate. But Teller writes in his introduction, “Our memories are selective; they delete some events and magnify others. Just the simple act of recalling the past affects the recollection of what happened. That some of my remembrances are not the commonly accepted version of events should not be surprising.” Memoirs are not history. Memoirs are the raw material for history. Memoirs written by generals and politicians are notoriously inaccurate. A writer of memoirs should make an honest attempt to set down the course of events as they are recorded in memory. This Teller did. If some of the details are wrong, this detracts little from the value of his book as a panorama of a historical epoch in which he played a leading role. I have used the memoirs as the basis for this brief summary of his career. Teller was born in 1908 into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family in Budapest. He lived through the turbulent years of World War I, the dismemberment of the AustroHungarian Empire, the short-lived Communist regime of Bela B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRS Kun, and the devastating currency inflation that followed, protected by loving and resourceful parents. All through his life, from childhood to old age, he had a gift for friendship. His memoirs are full of stories about his friends and the tragic fates that many of them encountered. He cared deeply for them as individuals and described them with sympathetic understanding. He escaped from sharing their fate when he emigrated from Hungary to Germany in 1926, from Germany to Denmark in 1933, to England in 1934, and to America in 1935. He always retained an acute sense of the precariousness of human life and the fragility of political institutions. He was one of the lucky survivors of a great tragedy, when barbarians overran Europe and destroyed the world of his childhood. He saw America as the last refuge, for himself and for the civilization that he cherished. That was why he saw it as his inescapable duty to keep America armed with the most effective weapons, with bombs for deterring attack, and with missiles for active defense. The springtime years of Teller’s professional life, the years when he was happiest with his work and his friends, were the seven years between 1926 and 1933 that he spent as a student in Germany. His stay in Germany started badly. Riding a trolley car in Munich to meet some friends for a hiking trip, he overshot the meeting place, jumped off the moving trolley car, and fell under the wheels. His right foot was chopped in half. As he lay in the road assessing the damage, he thought how lucky he was not to be one of the millions of young men who had lain wounded on the muddy battlefields of World War I a few years earlier. At least he was alive, with a clean wound and the certainty of being rescued. The surgeon in Munich reconstructed what was left of his foot so that he could still walk on the heel. With the help of a prosthesis he became agile enough to go hiking in the mountains and to play a respectable game of EDWARD TELLER Ping-Pong. He observed that his mother suffered more than he did from the accident. As she sat grieving by his bedside at the hospital, he tried unsuccessfully to cheer her up. For her it was a deeply tragic event, while for him it was merely a nuisance that did not touch the important things in his life. The accident gave him confidence. As he liked to say when I got to know him 20 years later, if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. The accident gave him a good excuse to leave Munich and go to Leipzig to work with Heisenberg. The years 1926-1933 were the time when German science was blazing with creative activity while the Weimar Republic was crumbling. When Teller joined the group of young people working at Leipzig with Heisenberg as leader, Heisenberg was 28. He had invented quantum mechanics in 1925 and then invited all and sundry to join him in using quantum mechanics to understand the workings of nature. Quantum mechanics described the behavior of atoms, and so it should be able to explain everything that atoms do. It should be possible with quantum mechanics to explain all of atomic physics, most of solid-state physics, most of astrophysics, and all of chemistry. There were enough good problems, so that every student could find something important to do. Teller, having been trained as a chemist, chose chemistry as the subject to be explained with quantum mechanics. He started well by beating Heisenberg at Ping-Pong. He and Heisenberg remained friends for life. After World War II, when many American physicists condemned Heisenberg for staying in Germany through the Hitler years, Teller went out of his way to befriend him. He knew that Heisenberg had never been a Nazi, and he respected Heisenberg’s decision to stay loyal to his country and share its fate. In Leipzig Teller wrote a Ph. D. thesis (1930) on the hydrogen molecule ion, the simplest of all molecules. He was able to calculate not only the ground state but also the excited B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRS quantum states of the molecule, using an old-fashioned mechanical calculator. But he did not enjoy working alone. He much preferred the give-and-take of working together with friends. Almost all his work after the thesis was done jointly with others. During his years in Germany he collaborated fruitfully with Lev Landau, George Placzek, and James Franck, solving various problems on the borderline between physics and chemistry. As he himself said, he was a problem solver rather than a deep thinker. He enjoyed solving problems, whether or not they were important. The years 1926-1933 were harvest time for problem solvers. In those years the problem solvers laid the foundations for most of modern physics and chemistry. Teller’s main contributions during this time were to explain diamagnetism in solids (1931), and to explain spectra of polyatomic molecules (1933). Both these problems required the application of quantum mechanics to systems involving many electrons. When Hitler took power in 1933, Teller moved to Copenhagen. There he met George Gamow, a young Russian who had been the first to apply quantum mechanics to nuclear physics. In 1934 Gamow moved to George Washington University in Washington, D.C, and Teller moved to London with his newly wed wife, Mici. She was a childhood friend from Budapest who loved and sustained him through all his joys and sorrows, and remained by his side for 66 years until her death in 2000. In 1935 Gamow invited Teller to join him at George Washington University, and Mici, who had spent two years in America as a student, encouraged him to accept. During the years 1935-1939 that Gamow and Teller were together in Washington, they almost recreated the golden age of German physics in America. They found many of their European friends already in America, and quickly made new friends among the natives. EDWARD TELLER Gamow was four years younger than Heisenberg and almost as brilliant. But Gamow had no skill as an organizer and no desire to be a leader like Heisenberg. He produced brilliant new ideas at a rapid rate, and left it to Teller to work out the details. He also left to Teller the chores of administration, organizing meetings, and taking care of students. Teller worked happily with Gamow and also with other collaborators. The most important results of Teller’s research during this time were the Gamow-Teller theory of weak interactions (1936) and the Jahn-Teller theory of polyatomic molecules with electrons in degenerate states (1937). The Gamow-Teller theory was in competition with an alternative theory due to Fermi. This was one of the very few occasions on which Fermi guessed wrong. The GamowTeller theory was Teller’s first venture into nuclear physics. Twenty years later it became the basis for a unified theory of weak interactions. One of Teller’s friends in Washington was Merle Tuve, an American and a first-rate physicist who built particle accelerators and used them to do nuclear experiments at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution. Tuve was one of the pioneers of accelerator physics, and made the first accurate measurements of the nuclear interaction between two protons. After Teller had spent a summer teaching in Chicago, the University of Chicago was thinking of offering him a permanent job. The Chicago physicists wrote to Tuve asking for his opinion of Teller. Tuve wrote back, “If you want a genius for your staff, don’t take Teller, get Gamow. But geniuses are a dime a dozen. Teller is something much better. He helps everybody. He works on everybody’s problem. He never gets into controversies or has trouble with anyone. He is by far your best choice.” Teller quotes this letter in his memoirs and remarks, “I do believe it described me as I was during those happy years B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRS in Washington.” He looked back on those years with nostalgia as a time when he could do science with everyone and be friends with everyone, before the bitter struggles over nuclear politics took him away from science and tore apart his friendships. The record of Teller’s publications confirms Tuve’s statement. Teller in the first half of his life had an unusual gift for fruitful collaborations. I have taken 1952 as the point of division between the two halves of his life. In 1952 he moved from the University of Chicago to the new weapons laboratory that he founded at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. That was the year when he stopped being an academic scientist and became a full-time nuclear entrepreneur. In the bibliography of his technical publications there are 146 papers. Before 1952 he wrote 7 papers alone and 77 with collaborators. In that period most of his papers describe research done with one collaborator. Many of the leading physicists of that time appear as collaborators. After 1952 he wrote 42 papers alone and 20 with collaborators. In that period most of the papers are reviews or lectures, describing plans for the future or surveys of the past. The transition from a gregarious to a solitary pattern of intellectual life is painfully clear. In January 1939 Gamow and Teller were hosts at the meeting of theoretical physicists, which was held annually at George Washington University. That year’s meeting was supposed to be devoted to low-temperature physics. On the first morning of the meeting Gamow introduced Niels Bohr, who had just arrived on a ship from Denmark, and Bohr told the assembled physicists the news of the discovery of fission of uranium in Germany a month before. In the evening of the same day Merle Tuve invited everyone to his laboratory to see a demonstration of the intense bursts of ionization EDWARD TELLER produced by uranium fission in a Geiger counter. The age of nuclear energy had arrived, and Teller was involved in it from the first day. In February 1939 Teller’s friend Leo Szilard called him from New York to announce that he had found abundant secondary neutrons emitted in uranium fission. This meant that an explosive nuclear chain reaction was certainly possible. In March 1939 an informal strategy meeting was held in Princeton. Present were Bohr, Wheeler, Wigner, Weisskopf, Szilard, and Teller. One American, one Dane, one Austrian, and three Hungarians. Two decisions were made; first to keep further discoveries about fission secret so far as possible, second to try to bring the situation to the attention of responsible people in the American government. In June 1939 Teller moved from Washington to Columbia University to help Fermi and Szilard with their project to build the first nuclear reactor. In New York a few weeks before the outbreak of World War II, Heisenberg came to visit Teller. He was on his way back to Germany from a lecture tour in America. He had many offers of jobs in America and could easily have stayed. Teller asked him why he was going back to a country that was clearly headed for disaster. Heisenberg replied, “Even if my brother steals a silver spoon, he is still my brother.” Teller understood that nothing he could say would cause Heisenberg to change his mind. A few days later Szilard, who could not drive a car, came to see Teller and asked him for a ride. Szilard had written a letter to President Roosevelt informing him of the discovery of fission and the possibility of nuclear bombs. The letter asked the President to set up a channel of communication between the government and the physicists working on nuclear chain reactions in America. Szilard’s plan was to persuade Einstein to sign the letter. Teller was needed as a chauffeur to bring Szilard and the letter to Einstein’s summer 10 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRS home on Long Island. Einstein signed the letter, and Szilard successfully delivered it to Roosevelt. As a result, an official Advisory Committee on Uranium was established, and the bureaucratic machinery that later grew into the Manhattan Project slowly began to grind. Teller worked on nuclear energy from 1939 to 1945: two years at Columbia University helping Fermi design the first nuclear reactor, two years at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago helping to design the Hanford plutonium production reactors, and two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on bombs. In all three places he worked on a variety of projects. His wide knowledge of physics and chemistry made him useful as a liaison between different parts of the enterprise. The one thing that he could not and would not do was to sit down and do precise theoretical calculations. His thesis work, calculating the states of the hydrogen molecule ion, had given him a lifelong distaste for lengthy calculations. At Los Alamos this brought him into collision with Hans Bethe, the head of the Theoretical Division, who was Teller’s boss. Bethe asked him to do a massive calculation of the physics and hydrodynamics of an imploding bomb. Teller refused, saying that if he tried to do such a calculation he would not make any useful contribution to the war effort. Teller’s friendship with Bethe never recovered from this disagreement. Oppenheimer moved Teller out of Bethe’s division and made him leader of an independent group. After that, Teller reported directly to Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer kept him busy with a variety of assignments more suited to his temperament. Teller enjoyed working for Oppenheimer and considered him an excellent director. During the wartime years Teller worked only intermittently on hydrogen bombs. This work started in the summer of 1942 when Oppenheimer held a meeting in Berkeley to explore the possibilities. The meeting concluded that if a EDWARD TELLER 11 fission bomb could be made to work, it could probably be used to ignite a hydrogen bomb. After the meeting Teller found reasons why the ignition would not work. He became seriously interested in the problem and continued to think about it. During his two years at Los Alamos he spent about one-third of his time working on hydrogen bombs. The result of his efforts was a very sketchy design called the Classical Super. The question whether the Classical Super would work could only be decided by massive calculations, using electronic computers that did not yet exist. There matters stood from 1945 to 1950. From 1946 to 1952 Teller was a professor at the University of Chicago. He enjoyed the return to academic life and especially enjoyed interacting with a brilliant bunch of students, including Chen Ning Yang, Tsung Dao Lee, Marshall Rosenbluth, and Marvin Goldberger. Two of his closest friends, Enrico Fermi and Maria Mayer, were colleagues. During these years he worked with Fermi on the capture of negative mesons in matter (1947), with Mayer on the origin of the chemical elements (1949), and with Robert Richtmyer on the origin of cosmic rays (1949). I met Teller for the first time in March 1949 when I gave a colloquium in Chicago with Fermi and Teller sitting side by side in the front row. I spoke about the new theories of quantum electrodynamics. I made some very polite remarks about Schwinger’s theory and then explained why Feynman’s theory was better. As soon as I finished my talk, Teller asked a question and answered it himself. “What would you think of a man who cried, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,’ and then at once drank down a great tankard of wine? I would consider him a very sensible fellow.” Afterward I was able to meet with Teller alone and he talked happily about all the things he was doing. 12 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRS I quote now from a letter that I wrote to my parents in England, dated March 11, 1949. Teller to me has always been an enigma. He has done all kinds of interesting things in physics, but never the same thing for long, and he seems to do physics for fun rather than for glory. However, during the last few years there have been reports that he has been engaged in perfecting the most fiendish engines of destruction; and I have always wondered how such a man could do such things. In Chicago I found without difficulty the answer. I started a long argument with him about political questions, and it appears that he is an ardent supporter of the ‘World Government’ movement, an organization which preaches salvation in the form of a world government, to be set up in the near future with or without Russia, and to have sovereign powers over the economic and social policies of its member nations. Teller evidently finds this faith soothing to his conscience; he preaches it with great charm and intelligence; all the same, I feel that he is a good example of the saying that no man is so dangerous as an idealist. In the same letter there is a passage describing the community of physicists in Chicago. The most striking thing about all these people, and also their wives whom I met as I went from house to house and from family to family, is how happy they seem to be. All of them say they have never found any place on earth so pleasant to be in as Chicago. There seems to be an exceptionally free and easy atmosphere, rather like Cornell, and with the added advantages of a metropolitan city. These were the golden years of physics in Chicago, when Fermi was king and Teller was his court jester. Teller enjoyed those years to the full. But during those same years he could not stop thinking about the question that he had left unanswered when he left Los Alamos in 1946. Could a hydrogen bomb be made to work? In June 1949 he returned to Los Alamos to continue his lonely effort to understand what Nature allows us to do. In August the first Russian nuclear bomb was tested, and in January 1950 President Truman announced that work on the “so-called hydrogen or super bomb” would continue. After the President’s EDWARD TELLER 13 announcement Teller wrote to Maria Mayer from Los Alamos. “Whatever help and whatever advice I can get from you—I need it. Not because I feel subjectively that I must have help, but because I know objectively that we are in a situation in which any sane person must and does throw up his hands and only the crazy ones keep going.” In 1950 electronic computers were able to simulate in a rough fashion the Classical Super design for a hydrogen bomb and showed that it did not work. George Gamow drew a famous cartoon of Teller trying to set fire to a wet piece of rock with a match. But to Teller the downfall of the Classical Super came as a liberation. For eight years his thoughts had been fixed on the Classical Super, which required deuterium to burn at low density, so that radiation could escape from the burning region and not come to thermal equilibrium with the matter. The idea was to achieve a runaway burn, with the temperature of the matter remaining much higher than the temperature of the radiation. The computers showed that runaway burn did not work. So Teller started to look seriously at the opposite situation, with deuterium at high density and the radiation trapped in thermal equilibrium with the matter. Teller quickly found that at high density, deuterium could burn well in thermal equilibrium. From that point it was a short step to design an arrangement by which a fission bomb could compress deuterium to high density and then ignite it. Teller’s colleague Stanislas Ulam at Los Alamos thought of a similar arrangement at the same time, and so the idea became known as the Teller-Ulam design. It was successfully tested in 1952 and has been the basis for American hydrogen bombs ever since. Andrei Sakharov had the same idea in 1954, and it quickly became the basis for Russian hydrogen bombs too. Many years later Teller and Sakharov met. They did not agree about political questions but expressed a deep 14 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRS respect for each other. Sakharov remarked in his memoirs that Teller’s treatment at the hands of his American colleagues was “unfair and even ignoble.” In 1951 Teller returned briefly to his academic life in Chicago, but in 1952 he moved permanently to the Livermore laboratory, a brand-new weapons laboratory that his friend Ernest Lawrence had organized in California to give some competition to Los Alamos. He stayed at Livermore for 23 years, attracted a brilliant group of young collaborators, and saw the laboratory quickly rise to become an equal partner with Los Alamos in weapons development and in many other enterprises. Livermore was more adventurous than Los Alamos and more willing to try out crazy ideas. A much larger fraction of Livermore bomb tests failed, but Teller considered failed tests a badge of honor rather than a disgrace. In the end the Livermore-designed weapons proved to be as rugged and reliable as those designed at Los Alamos. Soon after Teller moved to Livermore he was invited to testify at the Oppenheimer security hearings in Washington. At the hearings he was asked whether he considered Oppenheimer to be a security risk, and answered, “Yes.” For this the majority of physicists, including many of his friends, never forgave him. The estrangement caused Teller tremendous grief. The community of physicists was split in two, and Teller became a symbol of the division. At the time when this happened I was puzzled and shocked by the violence of the reaction against Teller. To me it seemed that the main question was whether the security rules should be applied impartially to famous people and unknown people alike. It was a question of fairness. If any unknown person had behaved as Oppenheimer behaved, telling a lie to a security officer about an incident that involved possible spying, he would certainly have been denied clearance. EDWARD TELLER 15 The question was whether Oppenheimer, because he was famous, should be treated differently. Should there be different rules for peasants and princes? This was a question concerning which reasonable people could disagree. I tended to agree with Teller that the rules ought to be impartial. And I saw no reason why people who disagreed with him should condemn him for speaking his mind. Teller’s estrangement from the community of physicists became worse when three of his closest friends, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, and Ernest Lawrence, happened to die prematurely within a few years after the Oppenheimer hearings. Each of them died in his fifties and should have remained vigorously active for at least another 20 years. The loss of all three made Teller even more isolated as he started his new life at Livermore. In the summer of 1956 I had one of my happiest experiences, working with Teller on the design of a safe nuclear reactor. Teller’s friend Frederick de Hoffmann, a young physicist from Los Alamos, had started a company called General Atomic in San Diego to manufacture reactors for civilian use. Teller and I came for the summer with a group of physicists and chemists and engineers to help the company get started. Teller had been saying for many years that the essential problem for public acceptance of nuclear power was safety. He proposed that General Atomic should start by building a spectacularly safe reactor. His definition of safe was that you could give the reactor to a bunch of children to play with and be sure that they would not get hurt. Safety must be guaranteed by the laws of nature and not by engineered safeguards. For three months Teller and I argued furiously about the design. Every day Teller would think of some brilliant new idea and the rest of us would do calculations to show why it would not work. Finally we found a scheme that worked and used it to design a small 16 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRS reactor called TRIGA, short for Training, Research, and Isotope-production, General Atomic. The TRIGA was designed, built, licensed, and sold within two years. The company sold 75 of them, mostly to hospitals for making short-lived isotopes, and they have never run into any safety problems. Teller and I had hoped that big power reactors using the TRIGA design could give rise to a nuclear power industry without safety problems. Unfortunately, the nuclear power industry was stuck with designs borrowed from the submarine-propulsion reactor program of Admiral Rickover, and never considered the TRIGA design as a serious competitor. Many years later Teller and his colleagues at Livermore developed designs for safe nuclear power reactors that could be buried deep underground, operated with a single loading of fuel for 50 years, never refueled, and never unloaded. Teller remained always hopeful that nuclear power would one day be so safe that the public would finally accept it. Teller pushed hard to develop at Livermore other programs besides weapons development. He started a very successful educational program informally known as Teller Tech, which brought graduate students to the University of California campus at Davis. The students were enrolled in the College of Engineering at Davis and received Ph.D. degrees in applied science from Davis, but spent half their time at Livermore. Courses were taught by leading scientists at Davis and at Livermore. Teller enjoyed doing his share of the teaching. Many of the graduates remained at Livermore as members of the staff, while others went on to distinguished careers in universities and in industry. Roughly one-half of the Livermore budget went into weapons. In addition, there was a large program to build controlled fusion reactors, both magnetic and inertial. There was a program to develop a supersonic nuclear ram- EDWARD TELLER 17 jet that could fly nonstop around the world at low altitude. And there were two projects that were particularly dear to Teller’s heart, the PLOWSHARE program to use nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes, and the strategic defense program to shoot down enemy missiles using X-ray lasers and brilliant pebbles. The PLOWSHARE program aimed to use nuclear explosions to excavate large masses of dirt or rock cheaply, the main purpose being to create artificial harbors and canals. To minimize the contamination of the landscape by radioactive fallout, the PLOWSHARE experts designed bombs whose explosive yield came mostly from fusion and as little as possible from fission. The X-ray laser was a device that could convert a substantial fraction of the energy of a fission bomb into a collimated beam of X rays. It was supposed to kill missiles a long way away by firing X rays at them with extreme accuracy. The brilliant pebble was a small interceptor rocket that was supposed to kill a missile by direct impact. In the end neither the PLOWSHARE program nor the strategic defense program fulfilled Teller’s hopes. None of the places that were candidates for PLOWSHARE excavations welcomed the idea with enthusiasm. Nobody had any urgent need for new harbors and canals, and as environmental regulations became more stringent the chance that any PLOWSHARE project would ever be approved became increasingly remote. Livermore’s proposals for strategic defense also ran into difficulties. The X-ray laser was designed to destroy missiles in the boost phase while they were still accelerating with rocket power, but the X rays could not penetrate any considerable depth of atmosphere. As a result, the missiles could defeat the defense by accelerating more rapidly and shortening the boost phase. The brilliant pebbles were supposed to weigh a couple of pounds and turned out to weigh a couple of hundred pounds. Extravagantly large 18 B IO G RA P H ICAL MEMOIRS numbers of them would be required to be sure of having one at the right place and time to intercept a missile. However, the Strategic Defense Initiative that President Reagan started in 1983 embodied some of the Livermore proposals, and Teller gave it strong support. After the Strategic Defense Initiative had spent a lot of money and accomplished very little, Teller and I went together to the Pentagon to talk with General Abrahamson, who was then running the program. Teller and I agreed that strategic defense was in principle a good idea, and that secrecy was in principle a bad idea. The SDI was a technically flawed program whose failures were concealed by excessive secrecy. Teller and I went to the general to tell him that the only way to make SDI technically effective was to abolish the secrecy and bring it out into the open. If the program were open, it might receive the expert criticism and the influx of new ideas from the outside that it desperately needed. Teller delivered the message with his usual eloquence, and the general responded by saying that of course he agreed with us, and he would be removing the secrecy within a few weeks. Needless to say, nothing of the kind ever happened. Teller remained publicly supportive of SDI but privately furious at the general for deceiving us. In 1975 Teller retired from Livermore and became a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on the campus of Stanford University. Here he spent the sunset years of his life, in close touch with the work of the laboratory at Livermore, writing books, and giving lectures, politically active to the end, still fighting for strategic defense and nuclear energy. At the end of his memoirs is a chapter titled “Homecoming,” describing his seven visits to Hungary between 1990 and 1996. In Hungary he felt immediately at home after an absence of 54 years. He had never stopped speaking Hungarian with his wife, so that he remained fluent in the language. He EDWARD TELLER 19 was welcomed not only as a national hero but as a long lost brother. He was as proud of Hungary as Hungary was proud of him. His homecoming gave his life the happy ending that was denied to him in America.R. Edward Teller, world-renowned physicist, co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and a lifelong advocate for education, died September 9, 2003. He was 95. “The loss of Dr. Edward Teller is a great loss for this Laboratory and for the nation,” said Livermore Director Michael Anastasio. “He was a passionate advocate for science, for technology, for education, and for Lawrence Livermore National Lab. He put his heart and soul into this Laboratory and into ensuring the security of this nation, and his intense dedication never wavered.” Since he embarked on his scientific career, Teller’s life has intertwined with myriad heads of state, dignitaries, and other elected officials. He met with every U.S. president since Franklin D. Roosevelt as well as with Pope John Paul II. Less than two months before his death, Teller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil honor, during a special ceremony conducted by President George W. Bush at the White House. Although Teller could not attend that ceremony—his daughter Wendy accepted the medal on his behalf—he was touched by the honor. “In my long life, I had to face some difficult decisions and found myself often in doubt whether I acted in the right way,” he said, commenting on the award. “Thus, receiving the medal is a great blessing for me.” Throughout his long life, Teller often found himself at the forefront of some of the 20th century’s most dramatic and history-making endeavors. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1908, Teller received a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Leipzig. It was Teller who drove Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner to meet with Albert Einstein, who together would write a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to pursue atomic weapons research before the Nazis did. Teller went on to work on the Manhattan Project at the fledgling Los Alamos National Laboratory and eventually became assistant director. His efforts were instrumental in creating the Livermore site of the University of California Radiation Laboratory in 1952. Teller strongly advocated development of the hydrogen bomb and promised and delivered a submarine-launched nuclear weapons system. He served as director at Livermore for two years and then as associate director for physics. “I always think of Edward Teller as passionately patriotic American with a deep Hungarian accent and a dry sense of humor,” said Duane Sewell, a Teller colleague and friend for more than 50 years. “He was committed to doing every thing in his power to create a strong America, and in my eyes, he went a long way toward achieving his goal. In my eyes he was a kind, caring human being.” To Teller, science and education always went hand in hand. He taught physics at the University of California (UC), then created and chaired the UC Davis Department of Applied Science, which is located at the Livermore site. He often admitted that knowledge was dangerous, but warned that ignorance “can be incomparably more dangerous.” He was an advocate for education, believing that education was vital to the U.S. if the nation is to maintain its leadership role in the world. In 1975, Teller was named Director Emeritus of the Laboratory and was also appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. In the 1980s, he served as a determined advocate for the development of a ballistic missile D “Edward Teller played a pivotal role in ending the Cold War. He has been a strong advocate for national defense and the cause of human freedom. The United States honors him for his excellence in science and in education, and his unwavering commitment to the nation.” —President George W. Bush, during his presentation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Edward Teller on July 23, 2003 defense system to protect the nation from nuclear attack. These efforts contributed to the end of the Cold War. Teller received numerous awards for his contributions to physics, his dedication to education, and his public life. He published more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from energy policy and defense issues to his own memoirs. Teller is survived by his son Paul, daughter Wendy, four grandchildren, and one great grandchild. His wife of 66 years, Mici, died three years ago. “Dr. Teller will long be remembered as one of the most distinguished individuals in science,” says Anastasio. “He devoted his life to preserving freedom, pursuing new knowledge, and passing along his passion for science and technology to students of all ages. We will greatly miss his enthusiasm and insight, his humor and passion, and the optimism he had for the future.”
Edward Teller has been revered as the father of the hydrogen bomb, a brilliant physicist who helped America win the cold war. He has also been reviled as the man who crucified J. Robert Oppenheimer and spurred a costly race for ever more destructive and dangerous nuclear weapons. In Judging Edward Teller, Istvan Hargittai weighs these diverse judgments into the most synthetic account of Teller’s life to date, with mixed results.
As a fellow Hungarian, scientist, and acquaintance of Teller’s, Hargittai is uniquely positioned to shed fresh light on Teller’s life. Using papers from the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Services, Hargittai provides a fascinating and amusing account of failed efforts to enlist first Teller, and then his sister, in communist espionage. Hargittai also makes good use of the Teller papers in the Hoover Library at Stanford. However, much of the book relies heavily on some problematic secondary sources, and especially scientists’ memoirs, while neglecting a large body of historical scholarship surrounding Teller.
Reliance on two particularly suspect sources—an outdated hagiography by Stanley Blumberg and Gwinn Owens (1976), and Teller’s own 2001 Memoirs—leads the book to repeat well-known errors. Hargittai’s use of Memoirs is odd, because he thoughtfully discusses Teller’s early-developed tendency of revising history and coping with difficulty by “denial” (p. 85). Hargittai also judges conflicting secondary sources, noting, for example, mistakes in Peter Goodchild’s 2004 biography (p. 235). But these discussions reveal little that is new. Instead, the book’s primary contribution is synthetic—it improves on two problematic biographies of Teller primarily because it is the first to depict the fullness of Teller’s life, not only as a controversial political figure, but also as a scientist.
Hargittai’s narrative follows three “exiles” (Teller’s word). First, the rise of communism and anti-Semitism in 1920s Hungary encouraged Teller and other rising Jewish scientists in Budapest to study in Germany. The rise of the Nazis in Germany uprooted Teller again in 1933, and he eventually landed at George Washington University, as a full professor in physics. In describing these first two “exiles,” Hargittai usefully captures several of Teller’s scientific collaborations and achievements in lay terms. Teller was a scientific “digger, not a driller” (p. 104)—that is, a scientist who engages many different questions, rather than focusing on one. Teller’s digging eventually led him to nuclear physics and the Manhattan Project, where he became fascinated with the prospect of developing a fusion bomb—but was forced to focus instead on the simpler fission weapon.
Teller’s third “exile” was the result of his testimony against Robert [End Page 509] Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project and icon of physics, in the loyalty-security hearings of 1954. Though many painted Oppenheimer as angel and Teller as devil, Hargittai judges Teller more favorably. Oppenheimer privately betrayed friends, whereas Teller proved loyal to a fault. Nonetheless, Hargittai acknowledges that Teller’s testimony was designed to carry strong negative weight—a fact that made him a pariah among many scientists. Whereas Teller’s first two exiles nurtured his scientific collaborations, this third exile undermined his scientific research. Teller instead became a public and political “monomaniac with many manias,” advocating aggressive nuclear weapons development at every turn.
Several chapters chronicle Teller’s political campaigns, such as his opposition to limits on nuclear testing, and his advocacy of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or “Star Wars” missile defense program). Unfortunately these chapters reveal little new, and a tendency to rely on scientists’ memoirs, rather than more comprehensive historical work, sometimes skews the account of these political debates. For example, Hargittai describes SDI as a “policy” (p. 403) and highlights Teller’s approach—the X-ray laser. But as a tangible research and development program, SDI redirected work on a far broader range...
A subject that generates strong emotions also generates strong convictionswhich are not easily turned around byreason The March 1983 issue of thepresented a reprint of my article from Digest DangerousMyths About Nuclear Weapons andan article by Frank von Hippel TheMyths of Edward Teller The controversy to which these articles refer hasbecome so heated that it seems helpfulto begin by emphasizing a point onwhich von Hippel and agreeTwo of the myths I discuss in theDigest article involve scient1fic matters much misunderstood bythe general public that nuclear weapons will create radiation or damage tothe ozone layer sufficient to create anapocalypse I am gratified that vonHippel offers not one word suggestingthat a nuclear war would be the end ofthe human raceIn my article I call attention to anerroneous idea which by repetitionhas been elevated to the status ofmyth The Soviet and American nuclear stockpiles are close to identicalThe Soviets are currently emphasizingexplosives of high megatonnage whichare particularly potent as instrumentsof terror and are the only ones thatconstitute any danger to the stratosphere Incidentally the only thorough analyses of this latter dangerhave been carried out in the LawrenceLivermore National Laboratory [ 1 91The fact is that the Soviet nuclearstriking power is much more potentand reliable than ours The roughquantitative comparison becomesclearer when one examines the available nuclear military forces item byitem In land based missiles the Soviets have a five or six to one advan42tage in explosive power For us a firststrike is completely excluded but unfortunately the same cannot be saidabout the Soviets who seem to seesuch a first strike as a preventivemeasure A Soviet first strike couldcompletely disarm our land basedmissilesIn bomber forces we are superiorHowever both the number of bombers that would be able to take off andmore important the number thatwould penetrate Soviet air space isvery questionable While we completely lack air defenses against Sovietbombers Soviet air defense is practically overwhelming-a fact that willnot be changed by putting our bombers on alert following indications oftension or impending attackIn submarine carried explosives weare approximately equal The generalpublic assumes that submarines aresafe from attack Indeed the Navy iskeeping existing doubts so secret thateven many responsible naval officersremain in ignorance about real dangers that may arise from advancedtechnology in detecting submarinesEven if submarines remain effectivetheir weapons are targeted against industrial and - regrettably- civiliantargets A force less oriented againstmilitary power than against innocentbystanders is adduced by von Hippelas an effective equalizer but leavesme wishing for a thorough changeNuclear war is not inevitable donot believe that the Soviet Union willstart such a war unless they feel sureof overwhelming superiority and indisputable success believe this situation does not yet exist But the Sovietsappear to be superior and surely aremaking more rapid progress than weeven at the present timePerhaps the most important part ofmy difference with von Hippel is connected with civil defense His attitudetoward civil defense- which wouldblunt the effects of nuclear war damage - is particularly hard for me to understand In view of the possibility ofnuclear war the most urgent and important duty seems to me to be toachieve the best possible preparednessof civilian protection We must remember that forces going on alertin case of a Soviet urban evacuationwill not save a single American lifeunless this alert succeeds in deterringwarTwo widely but wrongly held assumptions are present in the accusation that civil defense plans are not effective The first is that inexpensiveshelters cannot be well designed sanitary and safe to a protection factor of1 000 They can indeed be so designedand constructed [lo] The second isthat the conventional bomb sheltersheld no survivors in the atomic bombings in Japan In Hiroshima an allclear sounded before the bomb wasdropped so there were no people inthe shelters In Nagasaki the severalpeople in a conventional tunnel she1ter located of azero survived with minimal orno injury [ 111The idea that Soviet cities would beevacuated that individual familieswould build effective undergroundfallout shelters have adequate andappropriate supplies and remain intheir shelters for a few weeks has abasis in fact and sound planning [12131 Anyone doubtful of the ability ofthe Soviet transportation system toCommentaryprovide for such an evacuation in atense situation should examine the Soviet evacuation not only of personnelbut of entire vital industries whichwas conducted in 1941 during the fantastic progress of the Nazi invasionRadiation is indeed a hazard andvon Hippel in fact does not disagreewith my quantitative statements onthis topic It should be noted thatwhile population centers in the SovietUnion could be hit very hard as vonHippel points out the greater size ofthe country and the smaller megatonnage on our side would expose themto a lesser degree of fallout In factthis point is indirectly conceded in thediscussion of the area that Soviet superbombs would cover with falloutIt is true that considerable portionsof the United States could receive doserates greater than 1 000 rem per hourin the first few hours after an attackIn a large scale civilian oriented nuclear attack on the United States bythe Soviet Union about one eighth toone sixth of the United States primarily the Great Lakes Ohio RiverValley and the East Coast will sustainlevels above lethal values for an unpopulation Civil defensewould clearly be effective in savingmany lives in these areas [14] Thestructure of the radiation field inspace within this area depends onmany factors number and size of explosives per city clustering patternsfrom cities varying wind conditionspresence or absence of rain Thesedetails cannot be predicted in advance and only gross features can beestimatedClearly a dose rate of 100 rem perhour is lethal within a few hours Themain point of the paragraph whichvon Hippel attacks was to show howrapidly radiation fields decay I didnot advocate that people leave theirfallout shelters soon after attackwhen radiation levels are high In aworst case situation involving 10 000megatons being exploded in contactwith the ground over the most denselypopulated one third of the UnitedStates (a somewhat unrealistic scenario) the average radiation in thoseareas would be 30 to 50 rads* per hourafter five days if no rainful occursUnder these worst conditions people could at that time come out oftheir shelters for a very short timeeach day to perform essential tasksSome areas would have considerablyless radiation and the populationcould take refuge in these areas attimes determined by radiation doserate and the availability of transportation and supplies Most importantlycleanup operations in urban areaswhere fallout is heavy but blast destruction limited could be conductedfor the benefit of whole populations(Weapons fallout is so composed thatvacuuming of streets and sidewalkspossibly by remotely controlled machines would be effective in loweringthe radiation rate) All this emphasizes the serious need for carefullyplanned civil defenseIn the final section of his articlevon Hippel proposes something newmore negotiations This suggestionhad some novelty a quarter of a century ago Indeed the idea is even olderIt goes back to the period when Neville Chamberlain the British primeminister of good will and good intentions went to Munich with a simpleand direct approach to peace and cameback with what proved 11 monthslater to be the complete oppositeDemocracies by their nature will a1ways prefer peace to power TheTreaty ratified in 1972 did not specify the essential difference between reloadable and non reloadable silosToday we know that the Soviet silosare reloadable The unratifiedTreaty tried to rectify this It is highlyisof oflevels1983doubtful whether without thoroughon site inspections- which would involve the effective breakdown of theSoviet police state- this deficiencycan actually be changedThere is one final point of agreement We live in dangerous times withmany hazards deadly not to the human race but to countless individualsand what is even more important tothe human spirit In this situationvon Hippel and every sane individual agree that we must attempt notonly to prevent nuclear war but anywar The disagreement involves notour aim but the practical execution ofthis aimFor years have tried to counteractthe consequences of neglecting milltary technology in the United Statesthe consequences of negotiations governed by hopes for peace in our timeand the results of badly divided counsel Recently yet another erudite andgifted writer has offered this commentabout scientific experts All they cantell us is what the weapons areIn view of past and accelerating developments of weapons technology thereis clearly the possibility for technologists to make informed guesses aboutfuture weapons which could have surprising and (contrary to widespreadopinion) not invariably harmful results It is regrettable that in our schizophrenic world of two cultures nontechnical discussions presume withoutargument that technology has either astatic or a steadily more perilousnature Help could be provided but ifonly the rules of secrecy would permitit Without this permission we facenot only a window of vulnerabilitybut an abyss whose depths cannot beguessedhave long struggled with the problem Due to the initiative of brilliantyoung people have discarded manyof my old opinions and have come tohope for defensive nuclear weaponsdirected against the instruments ofwar in action rather than against peoof 43ple I was recently informed that atlast I may assert my interest in x raylasers but not my evaluation ofwhether these can have a place in a defensive arsenalFrank von Hippel is the grandsonof James Franck a giant in physicswith an understanding heart who wasmy mentor and dear friend A fewmonths ago I spoke in Chicago at thecentennial of his birth If he and hisgrandson had been present perhapsjointly we could have accomplishedmore than a printed and repetitiouscontroversy 01 J B Knox and others Program Reportforw 1981 Atmospheric and Geophysical Sciences Division of the Physics Department UCRL51444 812 J B Knox and others Program Reportfor FY 1980 Atmospheric and Geophysical Sciences Division of the Physics Department UCRL51444 803 J B Knox and others Program Reportfor FY 1979 Atmospheric and Geophysical Sciences Division of the Physics Department UCRL51444 794 W Duewer B J Wuebbles J SChang Effects of a Massive Pulse Injection ofNO, into the Stratosphere UCRL 80397 (April1978)5 Fred M Luther The Ozone Layer Assessing Manmade PerturbationsUCRL 5200 78 I (Jan1978)6 Fred M Luther Annual Report of theLawrence Livermore Lab to the High AltitudePollution Program- 1977 AD 57 139 (May1978)7 M C McCracken J S Chang Preliminary Study of the Potential Chemical and Climatic Effects of Atmospheric Nuclear Explosions UCRL 51653 (April 1975)8 J S Chang W H Duewer Possible Effect of NO, Injection in the Stratosphere Due toAtmosphenc Nuclear Weapons Tests UCRL74480 (May 1973)9 J S Chang Comments on the PossibleEffect of NO Injection in the Stratosphere Dueto Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests UCRL74425 (Jan 1973)ORNL 5037 Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Sept 1979)11 F X Lynch Adequate Shelters andQuick Reaction to Warning A Key to Civil Defense 142(Nov 8 1963) pp 665 6712 N I AIabin and others Civil(Moscow 1970) oRNL/tr 2793 (Oak Ridge National Laboratory translation) (Dec 1973)13 N I Akimov and others Civil(Moscow 1969) oRNL/tr 2306 (Oak Ridge Na4410 Cresson Kearny Wartional Laboratory translation) (April 1971)14 T F Harvey Influence of Civil Defenseon Strategic Countervalue Fatalities * UCID19370 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (April 28 1982)15 Leon Weiseltier The Great Nuclear Debate (Jan 10 17 1983) pp7 38YYYIn Edward Tellers reply to my critique hedoes not defend any of the manyclaims that I showed to be either misleading or false in his Digestarticle Instead he offers nine references to studies on the effects of nuclear explosions on the Earth s ozonelayer and five on the effectiveness ofsubsurface shelters against radioactive falloutAs Teller acknowledges his first setof references documents a point in hisarticle that I did not challenge that isthat a high yield nuclear explosion setoff at the Earths surface a muchgreater threat to the ozone layer thana number of smaller surface burstswith the same total yield The reasonis quite simple the larger fireball willrise farther into the sensitive layer ofthe stratosphereThe references on fallout sheltersare also not germane to my principalcriticism of Teller s discussion of thevalue of civil defense in an all out nuclear war I did not question thatgiven the time transportation supplies and equipment and favorableconditions a well trained populacecould build fallout shelters effectiveenough to allow survival for a fewweeks in areas not directly targetedwith nuclear weapons I did challengehowever Teller s implied equation ofsuch short term survival with thelong term survival of the populace ofa modern nation whose industrial andtransportation systems had been subjected to large scale nuclear attacksTeller has not responded to this fundamental criticismAs far as the future of the nucleararms race is concerned the most important issue raised by Teller’sers Digest article is his claim that thedeterrent effect [of U S nuclearforces] has become doubtful In mycritique I argue that such a statementis indefensible because no first strikecould reduce our deployed arsenal ofmany thousands of protected and deliverable strategic weapons to a sizethat is less than terrifying While inhis reply Teller expresses (in my viewgreatly exaggerated) concerns aboutthe vulnerability of U S strategicforces I am pleased to note that hecomes nowhere near reasserting hisoriginal claimFinally I would like to make apoint about the importance of secretinformation in the formulation ofpublic policy concerning nucleararms Teller s Digest articlebegan as follows‘Educating people about the natureand actual perils of nuclear weaponswould not be easy under any circumstances It is almost impossible whenthe elementary facts are guarded bystrict regulations of secrecyIn fact I believe that my critique andTellers response show that all of theelementary facts -true and falseasserted in his article can be checkedusing only information available inthe public domainIndeed Teller has indicated onlyone very limited area relating to thediscussion of x ray lasers where hehas felt restrained by secrecy regulations Even here however the promoters of the technology found a wayaround the censors A relatively detailed description complete with anartists conception of the hopes ofthese scientists (apparently includingTeller) for an anti ballistic missilesystem in space based on nuclear explosion powered x
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