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Physicist for Nuclear Age
By WALTER SULLIVAN
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 naveté. 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.
As 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.
The 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."
Walter Sullivan, a science writer and editor for The
New York Times, died in 1996.