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When Scientists Know Sin
Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller. Teller was marked at a
young age by the Bela Kuhn communist revolution in Hungary, in
which the property of middle-class families like his was expropriated,
and by losing part of his leg in a streetcar accident, leaving
him in permanent pain. His early contributions ranged from
quantum mechanical selection rules and solid state physics to
cosmology. It was he who chauffeured the physicist Leo Szilard to
the vacationing Albert Einstein on Long Island in July 1939 - a
meeting that led to the historic letter from Einstein to President
Franklin Roosevelt urging, in view of both scientific and political
events in Nazi Germany, that the United States develop a fission,
or 'atomic' bomb. Recruited to work on the Manhattan Project,
Teller arrived at Los Alamos and promptly refused to cooperate -
not because he was dismayed at what an atomic bomb might do,
but just the opposite: because he wanted to work on a much more
destructive weapon, the fusion, or thermonuclear, or hydrogen
bomb. (While there is a practical upper limit on the yield or
destructive energy of an atomic bomb, there is no such limit for a
hydrogen bomb. But a hydrogen bomb needs an atomic bomb as
trigger.)
After the fission bomb was invented, after Germany and Japan
surrendered, after the war was over, Teller remained a persistent
advocate of what was called 'the Super', specifically intended to
intimidate the Soviet Union. Concern about the rebuilding,
toughened and militarized Soviet Union under Stalin and the
national paranoia in America called McCarthyism, eased Teller's
path. A substantial obstacle was offered, though, in the person of
Oppenheimer, who had become the chairman of the General
Advisory Committee to the post-war Atomic Energy Commission.
Teller provided critical testimony at a government hearing,
questioning Oppenheimer's loyalty to the United States. Teller's
involvement is generally thought to have played a major role in
the aftermath: although Oppenheimer's loyalty was not exactly
impugned by the review board, somehow his security clearance
was denied, he was retired from the AEC, and Teller's way to the
Super was greased.
The technique for making a thermonuclear weapon is generally
attributed to Teller and the mathematician Stanislas Ulam. Hans
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