|
Edward Teller (original Hungarian name Teller Ede) (January 15, 1908–September 9 2003) was an Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist of Jewish descent. He was known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb."
Early life and education
Teller was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary. He left Hungary in 1926 (partly due to the Numerus clausus rule under Horthy's regime) and received his higher education in Germany. He graduated in chemical engineering at Karlsruhe and received his Ph.D. in physics under Werner Heisenberg in 1930 at the University of Leipzig. In 1930 he made friends with young Russian physicists George Gamow and Lev Landau who then visited Western Europe.
He spent two years at the University of Göttingen and left Germany in 1934 through the aid of the Jewish Rescue Committee. He went briefly to England and moved for a year to Copenhagen, where he worked under Niels Bohr.
In February 1934, he married "Mici" (Augusta Maria) Harkanyi, the sister of a longtime friend.
In 1935, thanks to George Gamow's incentive, Teller was invited to the United States to become a Professor of Physics at the George Washington University, where he worked with Gamow until 1941. Prior to 1939, and the announcement to the scientific community of the discovery of fission, Teller was engaged as a theoretical physicist working in the fields of quantum physics, molecular physics, and nuclear physics. In 1941, his interest turned to the use of nuclear energy, both fission and fusion.
Perhaps the most important contribution by Edward Teller was the elucidation of the Jahn-Teller Effect (1939) which describes the geometrical distortion that electron clouds undergo in certain situations; this plays prominently in the description of chemical reactions of metals, and in particular the coloration of certain metallic dyes.
Work on the Manhattan Project
In 1942, having been part of Robert Oppenheimer's summer seminar on the possibility of atomic weapons -- where Teller first pushed for the idea of the "Super" bomb -- Teller joined the Manhattan Project at Columbia University and the University of Chicago with Enrico Fermi and Leó Szilárd. He was part of the Theoretical Physics division at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, serving as an assistant director, during World War II and pushed hard for the additional development of nuclear weapons into a fusion based "Super" -- an early version of the hydrogen bomb -- rather than using just the fission only atomic bomb. Because of his interest on the H-bomb, and his frustration at having been passed up for director of the theoretical division (the job was instead given to Hans Bethe), Teller refused to engage in the calculations of the implosion of the fission bomb. This caused tensions with other researchers, as additional scientists had to be employed to do that work -- including Klaus Fuchs, who later was revealed to be a Soviet spy. In 1946 Teller left Los Alamos to return to the University of Chicago.
The Oppenheimer controversy and the hydrogen bomb
Following the Soviet test detonation of an atomic device in 1949 he returned to Los Alamos in 1950 to join the hydrogen bomb program started by President Truman on Teller's initiative. During the same year Teller grew impatient with the progress of the program, insisted on involving more theoreticians, and accused his colleagues of lacking imagination. This worsened his relations with other researchers. When he and the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam came up with a working H-bomb design in 1951, Teller was not chosen to head the project. He left Los Alamos and joined the newly established Livermore branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory in 1952. The first hydrogen bomb to use the Teller-Ulam configuration was detonated in the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952, as part of Operation Ivy.
The differences between Teller and many of his colleagues were widened in 1954 when he testified against Robert Oppenheimer, former head of Los Alamos, at Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing -- he was the only member of the scientific community to label Oppenheimer a security risk. After Oppenheimer's security clearance was stripped, Teller was repudiated by many of his former colleagues. In response, Teller began to run with a more military and governmental crowd, becoming the scientific darling of conservative politicians and thinkers for his advocacy of American scientific and technological supremacy.
Teller was often known for getting engrossed in projects which were theoretically interesting but practically infeasible (the classical "Super" was one such project). During the Manhattan Project, Teller also advocated for the development of a bomb using uranium hydride, which many of his fellow theorists said would be unlikely to work. At Livermore, Teller continued work on the hydride bomb, and the result was a dud. 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."
Star Wars and other projects
Teller was Director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1958-1960) and then an Associate Director. He also served concurrently as a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. 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).
In the 1980s Teller began a strong campaign for what was later called the Strategic Defense Initiative, derided by critics as "Star Wars", the concept of using lasers or satellites to destroy incoming Russian ICBMs. Teller lobbied with government agencies -- and got the sanction of President Ronald Reagan -- for his plan to develop a system using elaborate satellites which used atomic weapons to fire X-ray lasers at incoming missiles. However scandal erupted when it later became apparent that the scheme was technically infeasible, and that Teller (and his associate Lowell Wood) had deliberately oversold the program and perhaps had encouraged the dismissal of a laboratory director (Roy Woodruff) who had attempted to correct the error.
He also proposed many peaceful uses of nuclear technologies, including a project to carve out a harbor in Alaska by detonating a hydrogen bomb on the sea floor. While working for the Atomic Energy Commission in the late 1950s and 1960s, he proposed "Project Chariot", in which hydrogen bombs would be used to dig a harbor more than a mile long and half a mile wide to provide a deep-water harbor for coal fields near Point Hope. Various factors, including opposition from the Inupiat people living near Point Hope and the fact that the harbor would be ice-bound nine months of the year, doomed the project.
Later years
Edward_Teller_(later_years).jpg
Edward Teller in later years.
In 1975 he retired, and was named Director Emeritus of the Livermore Laboratory and was also appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Teller suffered a heart attack in 1979, which he blamed on Jane Fonda: after the Three Mile Island incident, the actress Fonda had outspokenly lobbied against nuclear power while promoting her latest movie, The China Syndrome (a movie depicting a nuclear accident which had coincidentally been released only a little over a week before the actual incident). In response, Teller acted quickly to lobby in favor of nuclear energy, testifying to its safety and reliability, and after such a flurry of activity suffered the attack. Teller authored a two-page spread in the Wall Street Journal which appeared on August 1, 1979, under the headline "I was the only victim of Three-Mile Island", which 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.
An editorial criticizing the ad ran the next day in The New York Times, noting that it was sponsored by Dresser Industries -- the company which had manufactured the defective valve at Three Mile Island.
Teller's vigorous and unshamed advocacy for strength through nuclear weapons, especially when so many of his wartime colleages later expressed regret about the arms race, made him an easy target for the "mad scientist" stereotype (his accent and imposing eyebrows certainly did not help shake the image). 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.
Teller died in Stanford, California on September 9, 2003. 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. Among honors he received were the Albert Einstein Award, the Enrico Fermi Award and the National Medal of Science. He was awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush less than two months before his death.
Books
- Our Nuclear Future; Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities (1958)
- Basic Concepts of Physics (1960)
- The Legacy of Hiroshima (1975)
- 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)
External links
- LLNL's Edward Teller page (http://www.llnl.gov/pao/news/teller_edward/teller_edward/teller_index.html)
- Edward Teller's FBI file (http://www.thememoryhole.org/fbi/teller_edward.htm) (which outlines years of FBI agents trying to establish whether or not he was the same person as another Edward Teller who taught at a Marxist school in New York)
- LLNL Interview with Edward Teller (http://www.llnl.gov/llnl/history/teller.html)
| 
