Teller, Edward 1908-

TELLER, EDWARD 1908-

Physicist

Father of the Hydrogen Bomb

Edward Teller played an important role in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb during World War II. After the war, when many other scientists were calling for caution in research on further nuclear weapons, Teller was an outspoken advocate for building the powerful hydrogen bomb and other thermonuclear weapons.

Early Years

Born in Budapest, Hungary, then part of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, Teller was born into a middle-class Jewish family. He studied briefly at the University of Budapest (1925) before entering the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, in January 1926 to study chemical engineering. In 1928 he went on to the University of Munich to study physics. That summer his right foot was severed in a streetcar accident, and after several months of convalescence at home in Budapest, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig later that year. There Teller studied with physicist Werner Heisenberg and became increasingly aware of the growing threat of Nazism. After earning his Ph.D. in 1930, Teller accepted an assistantship for postgraduate work in physics at the University of Göttingen, a sign of his growing reputation among German physicists. Yet with the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Teller realized that, as a Jew, he had no future in Germany. After living in Denmark and London, he immigrated to the United States in 1935 and became a professor of physics at George Washington University.

The Manhattan Project

In 1940, after the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) was formed to coordinate wartime research, committee head Vannevar Bush made Teller a consultant to the Uranium Committee, a group created in response to warnings that Germany was preparing to make an atomic bomb. Two years later, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer brought Teller, who had become a U.S. citizen in 1941, to Berkeley as part of a group of theoretical physicists to work on problems related to developing the bomb. When Oppenheimer became head of a centralized nuclear-research laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Teller played an important role on the research team that developed the plutonium bomb that was dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Yet while other scientists were working on the details of this bomb, which was based on the principles of nuclear fission, Teller insisted on working on a far more powerful thermonuclear weapon—the hydrogen bomb—which was based on nuclear fusion.

Anti-Communist

In the late 1940s Teller, whose childhood had been scarred by the imminent Russian invasion of Hungary during World War I and whose native country came under Communist control after World War II, emerged as a militant anti-Communist and pursued his research on the hydrogen bomb with mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. When the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949, Teller urged President Harry S Truman to support a crash program to build thermonuclear weapons. Many other scientists, including Oppenheimer, James B. Conant, Enrico Fermi, and I. I. Rabi—who served as the general advisory committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)—opposed development of this H-bomb, but early in 1950 Truman ordered its speedy development. By 1951 Teller and Ulam had designed an ingenious, militarily practical hydrogen bomb. Even Oppenheimer later described it as "technically so sweet" one could hardly argue against building it. When it was tested in 1954, it exploded with the force of fifteen million tons of TNT.

Controversy

After the successful explosion of the hydrogen bomb, Teller moved to Livermore Laboratories at the University of California, Berkeley, to do research for the AEC. In 1954 he was ostracized by many in the scientific community for testifying against Oppenheimer when Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked. He retired from Berkeley in 1975 but continued to express his Cold War philosophy by supporting the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as Star Wars, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

Sources:

Stanley A. Blumberg and Gwinn Owens, Energy in Conflict: The Life and Times of Edward Teller (New York: Putnam, 1976);

Blumberg and Louis G. Panos, Edward Teller: Giant of the Golden Age of Physics (New York: Scribners, 1990);

Herbert F. York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976).