Teller, Edward

(b. 15 January 1908 in Budapest, Hungary; d. 9 September 2003 in Stanford, California), nuclear physicist, passionate advocate for nuclear weapons, often called the “father of the hydrogen bomb.”

Teller was born Ede Teller in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Max Teller, a well-to-do Jewish lawyer, and Ilona Deutsch, an accomplished pianist. He had a younger sister, Emmi. He married Augusta Maria Harkanyi-Schuetz, known as Mici, on 26 February 1934 in Budapest. They were naturalized as American citizens in Washington, D.C., on 6 March 1941. They had two children.

Teller was born during the dying years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the historic enemy of Russia. His lifelong hatred for Russia and for tyranny was rooted in his experiences as a boy during the short-lived Hungarian Communist dictatorship of Béla Kun in 1919 and the persecution of Jews during the subsequent fascist regime of Admiral Miklos Horth. “During my first 11 years, I had known war, patriotism, communism, revolution, anti-Semitism, fascism and peace,” Teller wrote in his 2001 Memoirs. “I wish the peace had been more complete.”

Teller was home-schooled until the age of nine. He then entered a private academy, where he was a gifted but unpopular student. “I had no friends among my classmates,” he wrote. “I was practically a social outcast.” He was fascinated by mathematics and physics, and he learned to play the piano and violin. He lost his right foot in a tram accident on 14 July 1928 and had to wear a prosthesis for the rest of life. He was distinguished by a limp, by dark, beetling eyebrows, and by a deep Hungarian accent that he never lost.

In 1925, upon his graduation from the Minta School in Budapest, Teller entered the University of Budapest at the age of seventeen. One year later he left Hungary to complete his education in Germany. He studied chemical engineering at the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe and graduated with a degree in chemistry in 1928. Teller subsequently studied physics at the University of Munich for a few months before transferring to the University of Leipzig. He earned his PhD in physics there under the future Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg in 1930.

From 1931 to 1933 Teller was assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Göttingen, until Adolf Hitler’s attacks on Jews persuaded him to leave Germany. With the assistance of the Jewish Rescue Committee, he moved briefly to London in 1934 and then to Copenhagen to work at the Niels Bohr Institute of Theoretical Physics.

In 1935, at the age of twenty-six, he came to the United States as a professor of physics at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In the fall of 1941 Teller switched to Columbia University in New York to join other physicists who were starting to develop a weapon based on nuclear fission, splitting uranium atoms. In June 1942 he moved to the University of Chicago to work with the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi on the fledgling Manhattan Project.

Already Teller was thinking about a much more powerful fusion weapon, in which hydrogen atoms combine, releasing enormous energy. He called it the “Super.” Hans Bethe, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, said that it was on a train ride to a conference in California that “Teller told me that the fission bomb was all well and good.... He said that what we really should think about was the possibility of igniting deuterium [heavy hydrogen] by a fission weapon, the hydrogen bomb.”

In April 1943 Teller moved to the new nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer. Teller was disappointed when Oppenheimer chose Bethe instead of him to head the theoretical division at the lab. This marked the beginning of a split in the scientific community between liberals gathered around Oppenheimer and conservatives gathered around Teller.

On 16 July 1945 Teller was among the scientists who witnessed the first test of an atom bomb, named Trinity, in the New Mexico desert. The first bomb was then dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945, and the second on Nagasaki three days later. Teller stayed at Los Alamos to continue work on a hydrogen bomb but was frustrated by a lack of support for his project. In February 1946 he returned to teaching physics at the University of Chicago.

In September 1949 the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, and Teller was invited back to Los Alamos to resume work on the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer, Fermi, and other liberals opposed going ahead with the H-Bomb, stating that the United States should set some limits on “the totality of war.” Oppenheimer signed a manifesto saying the bomb “should never be produced,” and Fermi called it a weapon of “genocide.” Nevertheless, on 31 January 1950 President Harry S Truman ordered the Atomic Energy Commission “to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb.” In a letter to a friend, Teller wrote: “I am more satisfied than I have been in the last 35 years or so.... I love the job I’m going to do.”

But on 17 September 1951 Teller resigned from Los Alamos, disappointed that the laboratory was not working hard enough on fusion technology. He returned to the University of Chicago, where he and the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed the first workable design for a hydrogen bomb. As the Russians tested more nuclear weapons, Teller pushed for a separate laboratory dedicated to the hydrogen bomb. As a result, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory opened near San Francisco in September 1952. Teller was hired the same year as a consultant, and he moved to the University of California in Berkeley to be nearby. To Teller’s annoyance, the Livermore laboratory never had exclusive control of the H-bomb but instead shared its development with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. On 1 November 1952 the first H-bomb test created an enormous fireball over a Pacific atoll, producing the equivalent of 10 million tons (10 megatons) of energy. The press began calling Teller the “father of the H-bomb.” He became associate director of Livermore in 1954 and was director from 1958 to 1960. He remained there as a consultant after retiring in 1975.

In the early 1950s a wave of anti-Communist suspicion, inflamed by the Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, swept the country. Oppenheimer, then chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), came under suspicion because of his previous contacts with suspected Communists. In an interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in May 1952, Teller said he had no reason to doubt Oppenheimer’s loyalty but complained about the latter’s opposition to the H-bomb project. At an April 1954 hearing on whether to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance, Teller said he believed Oppenheimer “would not knowingly and willingly do anything that is designed to endanger the safety of this country.” However, Teller went on to say, “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.” When Oppenheimer was stripped of his clearance in May 1954, many of Teller’s associates blamed him and repudiated him. “The exile I was to undergo at the hand of my fellow physicists, akin to the shunning practiced by some religious groups, began almost as soon as the testimony was released,” Teller wrote to a friend. “I was more miserable than I had ever been before in my entire life.”

As the rift widened between Teller and the more liberal scientists, he aligned himself with conservative politicians, thinkers, and military officers, who put the highest priority on America’s scientific and technological superiority over the Soviets. He was dismayed by rising pressure for a nuclear test ban, which led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to order a one-year moratorium on tests starting in October 1958. Lobbying by Teller and his allies contributed to the failure in 1960 of negotiations with the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for a permanent test ban. In his farewell address, Eisenhower warned about the power of “the military-industrial complex” and the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Eisenhower later said his warning was aimed at Teller, among others.

In the early 1960s Teller switched his attention to a new dream, an antimissile defense to complement or replace the strategy of devastating retaliation against an attacker, known as Mutual Assured Destruction. In 20 August 1963 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Teller said: “I am now convinced that we can put up a missile defence that can stop the attack of any weaker power.... [This] may make the difference between peace and war.”

In 1964 Stanley Kubrick’s satirical comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released. The popular film mocked right-wing politicians, the military, the arms race, and a scientist with a thick accent who loved the H-bomb. Many reviewers thought Teller was the model for the mad scientist character, although Kubrick never acknowledged it. The association infuriated Teller. Years later, when Teller was ninety-one and a reporter asked him about it, he threatened to throw the journalist out of his office.

Teller continued to teach physics at Berkeley and at the University of California, Davis, until his retirement in 1975. As a consultant for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he campaigned for a missile defense and the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes such as digging harbors and canals. He defended the nuclear power industry after the Three Mile Island power plant accident in 1979. He wrote articles and books, expanding on his deeply held conviction that the West must maintain military and scientific superiority over the Soviet Union.

In 1981 Teller was appointed to President Ronald Reagan’s White House Science Council. He helped persuade the president to launch his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), colloquially known as Star Wars, in 1983. In 1985 Reagan awarded Teller the National Medal of Science, praising him as a “tireless advocate” of SDI and “one of the giants of American science and one of the bulwarks of American freedom.” Teller’s many other honors included the Albert Einstein Award and the Enrico Fermi Award. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Science, and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Nuclear Society.

In December 1990, after the fall of the Communist regime, Teller went back to Budapest for the first time. “Like every other exile, I had dreamed of seeing my home again,” he wrote. He and Mici returned for a final visit in January 1991. “Our native land had survived a terrible nightmare, and we were able to see that it was recovering,” he said.

After his election in 1992, President Bill Clinton cut funds for missile defense, but Teller was delighted when President George W. Bush reactivated the project in 2001. On 26 August 2003 Bush presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, to Teller in a ceremony at Livermore. Two weeks later Teller died at the age of ninety-five in Stanford, California, of a stroke suffered a few days earlier. His body was cremated, and his ashes remain with his family.

Despite his achievements, Teller was a deeply controversial man. He inspired both admiration and jealousy in his fellow scientists. Because of his difficult personality, he was repeatedly rejected for leadership positions. His role in stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance earned him lasting hostility among liberals. But he was a hero to conservatives, especially among military and civilian cold warriors, who believed his work on the hydrogen bomb and his opposition to a nuclear freeze were vindicated by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The largest collection of Teller’s papers, dating from the late 1950s, is housed at the Hoover Institution Archives in Stanford, California. Information about Teller’s life can be found in his Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics (2001). He is the subject of many books, among which are William J. Broad, Teller’s War (1992); Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb (2002); and Peter Goodchild, Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove (2005). Obituaries are in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Boston Globe (all 9 Sept. 2003).

Robert S. Boyd