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Edward Teller

1908–2003 · 95 years Specialist

The physicist Los Alamos never forgave for his Oppenheimer testimony

Portrait of Edward Teller — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, restored by w:User:Greg L, Papa Lima Whiskey — 2010 — CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Edward Teller was born January 15, 1908, in Budapest, the son of a lawyer father and a pianist mother, into a Jewish family that observed little beyond fasting on Yom Kippur. Hungary's postwar quotas on Jewish university enrollment pushed him to Germany in 1926, where he studied chemistry at Karlsruhe before a visiting professor's lectures on quantum mechanics turned him toward physics. In 1928, a streetcar accident in Munich crushed his right foot; surgeons amputated it, and Teller spent the rest of his life on a prosthesis, managing pain largely through willpower. He earned his doctorate under Werner Heisenberg at Leipzig in 1930, and when Hitler took power in 1933 he fled Germany for England, then Copenhagen, arriving in the United States in 1935 to teach at George Washington University.

Teller joined the Manhattan Project in 1943 already fixated on a weapon nobody there had asked him to build: a fusion bomb he called the Super. The atomic bomb that ended the war held little of his attention once it worked; the hydrogen bomb did, and after the Soviet Union tested its own atomic device in 1949, Teller pushed a reluctant scientific establishment toward building his. In 1951, working with mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, he found the design that made a workable thermonuclear weapon possible, a breakthrough whose exact division of credit between the two men is still disputed. The United States detonated it in November 1952. Teller spent the rest of his career at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, championing bigger warheads, peaceful nuclear excavation, and later Ronald Reagan's missile-defense program, "Star Wars."

In 1954, Teller was the only physicist among his peers who testified against Robert Oppenheimer at the security hearing that stripped his former Los Alamos director of his clearance. Asked directly whether he considered Oppenheimer disloyal, Teller answered carefully — "I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and a very complicated person" — before adding that he would feel more secure with government matters in other hands. It was enough. Oppenheimer's career ended that year, and Teller's standing among fellow scientists did not recover either: Nobel physicist Isidor Rabi said flatly that the world would have been better without him, and Los Alamos colleague Robert Christy refused ever again to shake his hand. Teller kept working, largely welcomed in Washington and the military even as much of the community that had built the bomb with him stopped speaking to him.

Teller lived another half-century past the hearing, decorated by a government that found more use for him than his fellow physicists did — the National Medal of Science in 1982, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush two months before he died. He was also an early, largely ignored voice on climate change, warning an oil-industry audience in 1959 that burning fossil fuels could raise sea levels enough to submerge New York. He died September 9, 2003, at ninety-five. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is widely thought to owe something to him, a comparison Teller loathed; colleagues joked for decades that unfounded scientific optimism could be measured in units called "tellers."

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Edward Teller's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Jahn-Teller effect discovery
Explains molecular distortion in certain chemical compounds 1937
Teller-Ulam design invention
The radiation-implosion design behind every modern thermonuclear weapon 1951
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory company
Co-founded the weapons laboratory he led on and off for decades 1952
Strategic Defense Initiative advocacy other
Lobbied Reagan for the missile-defense program nicknamed "Star Wars" 1983
Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics book 2001