EDWARD TELLER, R.I.P.
This column I mourn the passing of a personal icon, Edward Teller, known by most as the "father of the hydrogen bomb," an appellation he disliked, not out of shame, but because he felt it gave him excessive credit. Shortly after his role in the development of the H-bomb became public knowledge, he wrote a piece called "The Work of Many People" to set the record straight. Though it appeared in Science in 1955, the label stuck for the remaining five decades of his life. Teller died on September 9, 2003, at the age of 95. I was nearly finished reading his autobiography Memoirs (1) when I heard of his death.
Obituaries of Dr. Teller describe him as a controversial figure. In addition to his hydrogen bomb work, he was also a strong proponent of building defenses against ballistic missiles (BMD, SDI, or "star wars" to some). And many in the physics community, due to his testimony at the hearing, blamed Teller for the revocation of the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
That Teller was, in fact, a controversial figure is impossible to deny. That he did, in fact, do anything that genuinely warranted the controversy he inspires, I strongly dispute. Indeed, history has shown that, in the matters in which his memory is impugned, Teller was on the right side, and his detractors, many of them the so-called "academic elite," on the wrong side.
The development of the atomic bomb was an unparalleled achievement, made possible by the concentration of brilliance assembled at Los Alamos. As most people know, in 1939 Albert Einstein sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt detailing the possibility of making an atomic bomb. But Einstein didn’t write the letter. It was written by Leo Szilárd, and he and Teller (Teller had to drive–Szilárd, genius that he was, never mastered the art) went to see Einstein, the most famous physicist since Isaac Newton, to sign it. So Teller was as "there at the beginning" of the nuclear age as it was possible to be.
Work on the atomic bomb began several years before the laboratory at Los Alamos was finished, but by March of 1943 it was possible for Teller and the other geniuses of the Los Alamos group to gather there. Their scientific and intellectual peer, J. Robert Oppenheimer, managed the lab. Though a scientist of exceptional managerial skill, Oppenheimer also had an exceptionally complex personality, not to mention a past that intersected significantly with communism. At the time, however, this was not unusual amongst American intellectuals.
Little needs to be said about the atomic bomb, and what happened during the war, and the bombing of Japan. What is interesting to note for our purposes is that Teller actually spent much of his time at Los Alamos puzzling over the possibility of making a hydrogen bomb. With the war over, many of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb felt guilty about it afterwards, to greater or lesser degrees. Others left the work convinced that they had done what needed to be done and the future was now up to the politicians. But almost all of them shared the feeling that they just wanted to get back to their academic work, and Teller did, too.
But such was not to be.
Immediately after the war, some–Oppenheimer included–thought that the work at Los Alamos was finished and that the lab should be shut down. But it didn’t take long before it was clear that it was in the national interest to continue to investigate the potentials of nuclear weapons, and so the lab would continue, albeit without most of the talent that had been assembled for the Manhattan Project. Teller was offered the chance to stay on at Los Alamos, but he was dismayed by the apparent lack of interest (one might even say hostile interest) in pursuing work to determine if it was possible to build a hydrogen bomb.
We must be clear on this point. Figuring out whether or not it is possible to build a hydrogen bomb is not the same as wanting to build hydrogen bombs. For the sake of national security, Teller wanted the United States to find out, and to be the first to find out, whether or not the so-called "super bomb" was feasible. (Teller was not one to prefer wishful thinking over genuine knowledge.) One of the reasons Teller felt this way while so many others in the A-bomb genius circle did not is because Teller had personal experience back in Hungary with just how heavy-handed communism could be. He also had a number of Soviet scientist friends from before the war, so he knew how capable they were of both building atomic bombs of their own and going further to build hydrogen bombs, if it could be done.
As is well known, the Soviets had a weasel in the Los Alamos hen house, he being the spy Klaus Fuchs. The information he conveyed to the Soviet Union proved very helpful to them in building atomic bombs of their own, though Teller never doubted that they could have done so on their own even without Fuchs, once they knew the bomb existed.
After the war, most of the scientists and intelligence people in the United States were convinced that the Soviets would not have a nuclear bomb until the 1960s. So, when they tested one in the fall of 1949, a more realistic attitude toward the Soviets needed to be adopted. Teller became a very vocal and capable spokesman for the side that wanted the United States to begin a vigorous program to develop thermonuclear weapons. Eventually, President Truman gave the go ahead to work on hydrogen bombs, and it is because of Teller’s public role in bringing this about that he became known as the father of the hydrogen bomb.
One curious fact about the development of the hydrogen bomb: Teller’s earliest conception of how one could perhaps be built turned out to be flawed. Indeed, the best computers of the era calculated that his design wouldn’t work, but just barely. Computers and nuclear knowledge of the day being what they were, this was not enough to say it couldn’t work, though many scientists wished this were so. Once work on the hydrogen bomb began again in earnest, Teller caught his mistake, and it turned out that making hydrogen bombs was much easier than anyone had thought. Indeed, within months of the first successful American hydrogen bomb test, the Soviet Union tested theirs.
Had it not been for Teller, the Soviet Union would have beaten the United States to thermonuclear weapons, and it’s not at all unlikely that we might now all be speaking Russian if they had.
During this same period of time, Teller had also grown disillusioned with the mind-set at Los Alamos. He felt that many of the scientists there were too convinced of their own infallibility, so he advocated the founding of a second weapons laboratory, to offer friendly competition. This led to the establishment of what is now called the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It also led to the Los Alamos physicists and their friends throughout the country getting their noses out of joint and having a collective, asinine hissy-fit (physicists being no less prone to this sort of immaturity than any other group).
Despite the twin real successes of getting a robust thermonuclear program under way and establishing a second dedicated weapons lab, that one thing that most blighted Teller in the eyes of the physics community was his testimony at the Oppenheimer security clearance hearing.
Volumes have been written about this hearing, and it is outside the range of this essay for me to rehash it, let alone pass judgment upon it. I don’t know whether or not Oppenheimer should have lost his clearances. Teller did not think he should have–at least, not based on any hard evidence he himself had.
The fact is, someone was out to get Oppenheimer, just as many other former communists were coming under intense scrutiny in those days. Teller had nothing to do with the hearing even coming about, but when asked to testify, he agreed. Granted, his testimony was less than an endorsement. Teller didn’t understand Oppenheimer. Shortly after testifying as follows, ". . . I have always assumed, and I now assume that (Oppenheimer) is loyal to the United States. I believe this, and I shall believe it until I see very conclusive proof to the opposite."–Teller went on to say–"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." (2)
That’s as damning as Teller’s testimony got.
Nonetheless, much of the physics community acted as if Oppenheimer’s subsequent loss of clearance was the result of Teller’s testimony. This seems unusually naïve. It was politics! Nothing Teller might have said instead about Oppenheimer, no matter how glowing, would have made a dime’s worth of difference to his fate.
Teller remained on the outs with the mainstream physics community for the rest of his life. Many of his old friends stuck by him–Von Neumann, Wigner, and Ernest Lawrence. Even Enrico Fermi, who strongly disagreed with many of Teller’s views in the post-war world, sought to heal the rift. But most in the physics community decided to remain assholes about it.
The last thing Teller did that continually irritated his detractors was his championing of a defense against ballistic missiles. His philosophy of "better a shield than a sword," and his tireless advocacy, often against vitriolic opposition, of what to me is the only sane position to take on missile defense, more than anything else made Teller one of my personal heroes.
Strangely, the academic sort of physicist, and even some who work or who have worked on nuclear weapons, deplore ballistic missile defenses. I don’t know why they feel this way. It’s almost as if they think that the history of weapons design should have stopped with nuclear bombs and missile delivery systems.
At first, Teller advocated pop-up defenses. Under this scenario, an attacker launches his missiles, and the defender launches his anti-missiles once he sees what’s coming. Teller wanted to build x-ray laser weapons, powered by small nuclear explosives, that could take out a hundred missiles at once. He did not want to rely on orbiting battle stations since he felt these would be vulnerable to preemptive attack.
But as time went on, the SDI program eventually produced Brilliant Pebbles. These were kinetic kill weapons that would have stayed in orbit until needed to destroy attacking missiles. Teller finally backed this sort of system because the Pebbles could be made so small that they would be nearly impossible to find, let alone attack. The important point for me about Teller’s change of tune is that he was even able to sing a new song. His anti-ABM detractors, on the other hand, haven’t been able to update their own arguments in thirty years.
We could still build Brilliant Pebbles. For a tiny fraction of what we’re currently spending in Iraq, we wouldn’t have to worry about missiles bearing weapons of mass destruction for at least the rest of my lifetime.
Teller was a great physicist, and a great man, who did great work during one of the most tumultuous times in history. His work helped to end two wars–WWII and the Cold War–and to prevent a third world war. Our timeline is a better place for having had him in it.
1. Memoirs by Edward Teller. Persus Publishing, 2001. ISBN 0-7382-0532-X
2. Ibid. pp. 382-383
