Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
career can, I think, be understood as an attempt to justify what he
begat. Teller has contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen
bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war,
because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are
now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we?
But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations
are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and
that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never
overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in
charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin,
this seems ingenuous.
Teller has been a major force in preventing a comprehensive
treaty banning nuclear weapons tests. He made it much more
difficult to accomplish the 1963 Limited (above-ground) Test Ban
Treaty. His argument that above-ground testing was essential to
maintain and 'improve' the nuclear arsenals, that ratifying the
treaty would 'give away the future safety of our country' has
proven specious. He has also been a vigorous proponent of the
safety and cost-effectiveness of fission power plants, claiming
himself to be the only casualty of the Three Mile Island nuclear
accident in Pennsylvania in 1979; he had a heart attack, he says,
debating the issue.
Teller advocated exploding nuclear weapons from Alaska to
South Africa, to dredge harbours and canals, to obliterate troublesome
mountains, to do heavy earth-moving. When he proposed
such a scheme to Queen Frederika of Greece, she is said to
have responded, 'Thank you, Dr Teller, but Greece has enough
quaint ruins already.' Want to test Einstein's general relativity?
Then explode a nuclear weapon on the far side of the Sun, Teller
proposed. Want to understand the chemical composition of the
Moon? Then fly a hydrogen bomb to the Moon, explode it, and
examine the spectrum of the flash and fireball.
Also in the 1980s, Teller sold President Ronald Reagan the
notion of Star Wars, called by them the 'Strategic Defense
Initiative', SDI Reagan seems to have believed a highly imaginative
story of Teller's that it was possible to build a desk-sized
orbiting hydrogen-bomb-driven X-ray laser that would destroy
10,000 Soviet warheads in flight, and provide genuine protection
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