Edward Teller

Hungarian-born American physicist

• Born: January 15, 1908
• Birthplace: Budapest, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Hungary)
• Died: September 9, 2003
• Place of death: Stanford, California

Teller helped establish the theoretical groundwork for the production of the first atom bomb; he was also instrumental in the development of the hydrogen bomb in the United States. In the public policy arena, Teller promoted the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and urged the United States to develop new technologies to ensure a strong defense.

Early Life

Edward Teller, born in Hungary, was the second child of Max Teller and Ilona (Deutsch) Teller. His mother was an accomplished pianist and was fluent in Hungarian, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. His father had a successful law practice in Budapest. As prosperous assimilationist Jews, Edward’s parents emphasized the value of education. Edward and his sister, Emmi, were taught English by a governess. Edward completed four years of training at the private Mellinger School and eight at the Minta gymnasium, or high school, both in Budapest.

Teller’s first year at Minta was in 1918; it was the end of World War I and the beginning of the rise of Russian Bolshevism. A year later, the government of Hungary was in the hands of Béla Kun, a hardline Communist and an inept leader. There followed a reign of terror, and the Teller family was touched by food shortages and fears of violence. Kun was a Jew, and Teller’s father sensed that resentment of all Hungarian Jews was growing in his country; yet at the same time there was intellectual ferment in Hungary. Budapest, in the postwar years, produced Eugene Wigner, Nobel Prize-winning physicist; Leo Szilard, one of the pioneers of nuclear physics; and John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematical minds of the century. Each, including Teller, would eventually emigrate to the United States.

Teller showed an exceptional mathematical ability, but his father insisted that his son study something practical. In 1926, just before his eighteenth birthday, Teller enrolled in the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany to study chemical engineering, which satisfied his father, and to take mathematics on the side.

Within two years, Teller was captivated by the field of quantum mechanics a new way of theorizing about the inner workings of atoms and continued his studies in 1928 at the University of Munich, not as a chemical engineer but as a physicist. It was in that same year that Teller lost his entire right foot in a streetcar accident. He soon learned to walk with an artificial foot, but in later years his portly five-foot nine-inch frame, great beetled brows, large ears, Hungarian accent, and uneven gait were the easy target of caricature. Teller could seem kindly but could as easily turn self-righteous and intimidating. Already, at the age of twenty, the gregarious Teller was developing a sense of self-assurance and of inner direction that some people saw as arrogance.

After the accident, Teller continued his doctoral studies at the University of Leipzig, studying under Werner Heisenberg, already famous for his “uncertainty principle” of quantum mechanics. Teller left the university in 1930 with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics; he stayed in Germany, working as a research consultant at the University of Göttingen until Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Teller realized that he had no hope of continuing his academic career in Germany, so, in 1934, with his theoretical work in physics already highly regarded, he began a year’s stay at the University of Copenhagen under a Rockefeller Fellowship. This was a pivotal time in Teller’s life. He studied with Niels Bohr and became part of a group of theoretical physicists who were looking at the atom with new eyes. Bohr had revolutionized physics with the “complementarity principle,” which described the atomic structure as exhibiting both wave and particle characteristics; further, it stated that the two views of atomic structure, though seemingly mutually exclusive, were both correct.

In Copenhagen, Teller met the Russian expatriate George Gamow , who, two years later, invited Teller to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., as a professor of physics. A year later Teller married his childhood friend, Augusta Maria “Mici” Harkanyi, in a civil ceremony on February 26. They had two children, Paul and Susan Wendy.

Life’s Work

Gamow is credited with encouraging Teller to focus on nuclear physics. In collaboration, they developed rules describing how certain subatomic particles could escape the atomic nucleus during radioactive decay. Both hosted a conference in January of 1939 that considered the possibility that an atomic nucleus, bombarded with subatomic particles, might actually split, releasing heat energy. Word had come from Berlin, via visiting lecturer Bohr, that uranium had been bombarded with neutrons and that, chemically, part of the uranium had become barium, a lighter element. The uranium nucleus had been split, and a kind of alchemist’s dream had been realized.

In March of that year, Teller was interrupted at home, in the midst of playing a Mozart sonata, by an urgent telephone call from Leo Szilard. Szilard had answered a question posed at the January conference: If neutrons could split atomic nuclei, would those atomic nuclei in turn emit neutrons? The answer was yes, and Teller remembered this answer as an ominous turning point in atomic physics. A chain reaction, with the release of immense amounts of explosive force, just might be possible.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a speech to the Eighth Pan-American Scientific Conference in May, 1940, galvanized Teller into pouring his energies into the development of nuclear weapons. In the light of the recent Nazi invasions of the Low Countries, Roosevelt called on scientists to do what they could to preserve American freedom and civilization. Some months earlier, Roosevelt had established an advisory committee on uranium in response to a letter signed by Albert Einstein, detailing fears that Germany was making progress in developing nuclear technology. The letter urged the president to stimulate and coordinate the American research program. Teller himself worked closely with Enrico Fermi, first at Columbia University, then at the University of Chicago, to construct the first nuclear reactor, a demonstration of a controlled but sustained nuclear chain reaction.

The Manhattan Project , conceived in 1942, served to bring the diverse research programs in nuclear fission (the splitting of the atomic nucleus) under the control of the United States Army. In 1941, Teller and his wife had become U.S. citizens; the next year, Teller joined with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a year later at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, to pursue theoretical studies and ultimately to deliver a working atom bomb. Teller was charged with proving that an atomic explosion would not destroy the earth in an uncontrollable chain reaction, setting the oceans on fire and consuming the world.

According to Hans Albrecht Bethe , who was in charge of the theoretical division at Los Alamos, Teller rankled at what he regarded as excessive secrecy and the lack of the long and open discussions to which he had been accustomed. Teller was more interested in what he called the “superbomb,” a device that would mimic the sun in employing the fusion of atomic nuclei to create vast new energy. Such fusion could be triggered only by a fission explosion. Yet Teller’s was a lonely voice; the push was on for a workable atom bomb, and Teller’s interests were shunted aside. Then, on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated, on top of a hundred-foot steel tower at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The force was equivalent to around twenty kilotons of TNT.

Though the war with Germany had ended, the newly produced atomic weapons were used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Teller had favored a demonstration, an explosion high over Tokyo with no casualties, to force the Japanese to surrender. Oppenheimer vetoed the idea, convincing Teller that scientists had no business making public policy. At the same time, Oppenheimer himself was pressing for the military use of the atomic devices.

With the end of World War II, Teller continued to lobby for the development of the fusion, or hydrogen, bomb, but there seemed little momentum at Los Alamos for more weapons work. Teller returned to teach at the University of Chicago, but when the Soviet Union exploded its first atom bomb in 1949, President Harry S. Truman launched a formal drive to fashion an American fusion bomb and Teller was ready.

Teller had returned to an assistant directorship at Los Alamos and proceeded with theoretical work on the superbomb. It appears that earlier calculations made by Teller relating to the fusion bomb had led to technical dead ends, but an idea by colleague Stanislaw Ulam, a mathematician, enabled Teller to overcome a major obstacle in the development of a trigger for the bomb’s thermonuclear fuel. A hydrogen bomb was successfully tested at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific, in 1952. Yet Teller, with his eye on the Soviet Union, was impatient with the pace of research at Los Alamos. He lobbied for a comparable laboratory under his guidance, which would pursue research in thermonuclear weapons to provide for a secure United States. In 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission established the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California. In later years, Teller divided his time between work at Livermore and as a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, at Stanford University in California.

In 1954, Teller found himself isolated from most of his other research colleagues after he testified against Oppenheimer, who had been accused of disloyalty and of delaying the development of the hydrogen bomb. Though, in Teller’s opinion, Oppenheimer was a loyal American, the former director of Los Alamos was a complicated man and Teller said that he would prefer to see United States interests “in hands which I understand better and therefore trust more.” After Teller’s testimony, Oppenheimer was denied a security clearance. There was little rebuttal, since most of the reasons Oppenheimer might have cited for delay were still classified. Many of Teller’s closest friendships were sundered over this seeming disloyalty to Oppenheimer.

In the 1950’s Teller became the public advocate of a strong national defense and of the rational use of atomic power. He helped develop safety standards for nuclear reactors and championed the ill-fated Project Plowshare in the 1960’s. One Plowshare proposal, for example, recommended that atomic bombs be used to dig a second “Suez Canal” through the state of Israel; another proposed to blast out a new harbor near Point Hope, Alaska, as a loading area for coal and oil. Ever an advocate for the continued development of technology, in the 1960’s Teller argued against the proposed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, on the grounds that stopping atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons would cripple the United States’ weapons program. Nevertheless, the Senate ratified the treaty in 1963. In 1979, Teller suffered a heart attack as he was lobbying to counter America’s fears about nuclear power following the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island. He later quipped that he was the only person whose health suffered because of the meltdown.

With the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency in 1980, Teller found a person friendly to the idea of deterrence based not on retaliatory firepower (the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine) but rather on more technologically sophisticated defensive mechanisms (the so-called Mutual Assured Survival doctrine). Teller endorsed President Reagan’s 1983 speech advocating a protective antimissile shield above the United States, able to intercept incoming Soviet nuclear missiles. Called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, popularly known as Star Wars), he advocated using satellites as the platforms for X-ray lasers to shoot down enemy missiles. Many scientists, including his old friend Bethe, accused him of minimizing the scientific challenges and overselling the idea. He also encouraged the government to build an antiballistic missile system, which President George W. Bush later approved.

Teller pursued a wide range of projects, many of them related to defense, until the end of his life. For instance, in the 1990’s Teller became interested in the danger posed to Earth by collision with a comet or asteroid. He collaborated with other scientists and participated in a 1995 international workshop at Lawrence Livermore to learn about the composition of such objects to find ways of protecting the planet, including the use of nuclear missiles to destroy or deflect a threatening object. He proposed solutions to environmental problems, notably suggesting a way be found to decrease the sunlight reaching Earth by 1 percent to counteract the rise in global temperatures from the greenhouse effect. He also grew interested in questions about the origin of life and evolution.

Teller retired from the University of California, where he had been a professor of physics at large since 1960, and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, becoming director emeritus. In addition to consulting with military and political leaders, in 1982 he served on the board of directors for the conservative think tank, Council for National Policy. After the fall of the Communist government in Hungary in 1989, Teller returned several times to his birth nation and took an active interest in political developments there. His favorite form of relaxation was to play the piano, enjoying classical music above all.

On September 9, 2003, Teller died in Stanford, California. Despite his prickly relationship with the scientific community, he received many honors. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Nuclear Society. His awards included the Sylvanus Thayer Award from the United States Military Academy, Albert Einstein Award, Enrico Fermi Award, Presidential Citizens Medal, Department of Energy’s Gold Award, National Medal of Science, and Presidential Medal of Freedom. An asteroid, 5006 Teller, was named for him in honor of his work to protect Earth from catastrophic impacts.

Significance

Teller’s optimistic vision of technology harnessed for the world’s benefit is reflective of a strong current in American life, that American expertise can triumph over almost any problem. In the postwar years, Teller soon recognized that scientific progress in the United States was largely a product of public policy. In the late 1950’s, he met then New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and, through Rockefeller, began to take an active interest in national energy policies. For Teller, Rockefeller was an attractive model of a liberal Republican. Both men called for international control of nuclear energy; both were deeply suspicious of the closed Soviet society; and both called for a militarily strong United States and an emphasis on civil defense. Through books and lectures, Teller continued to press for an abandonment of what he saw as American guilt over Hiroshima and for the fashioning of defense and energy policies that would see the United States well into the twenty-first century.

Teller’s scientific accomplishments included discoveries about the functioning of molecules, surface chemistry (especially the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller isotherm), quantum mechanics (such as the Gamow-Teller transitions of beta particle decay), and spectroscopy (the Jahn-Teller and Renner-Teller effects), and he developed a creative solution to the problem of the hydrogen-bomb trigger. Teller worked best when taking on cosmic theoretical questions; when he was convinced that his theories were accurate, he was content to let others do the detail work. He thrived on open discussion and, throughout his life, continued to call for the sharing of scientific findings.

Teller added several pieces to the puzzle of atomic fission and fusion; working with others (though sometimes reluctant to “go along with the crowd”), he fashioned weapons that would forever change the course of human history; he became an unreconstructed optimist about the technological future; and he worked in the public-policy arena to realize his vision of a strong United States, strong enough to frighten away all enemies.

Bibliography

Blumberg, Stanley A., and Gwinn Owens. Energy and Conflict: The Life and Times of Edward Teller. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976. The standard biography of Teller, written by a science writer and a broadcast correspondent. It is based on extensive interviews with Teller and other atomic scientists, but its authors lacked access to classified information dealing with Teller’s weapons-related activities and the Oppenheimer affair. Useful but dated.

Goodchild, Peter. Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. This in-depth biography examines the traumatic early experiences and the career frustrations that shaped a powerful personality that struck some as that of an evil genius and others as that of a courageous visionary. With photographs and bibliography.

Herken, Gregg. Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. This history of the Manhattan Project focuses on the web of spying and personality conflicts surrounding the massive undertaking and how it gave rise to Teller’s later behavior during Congressional anticommunist investigations. With photographs and a large bibliography.

Science and Technology Review (July/August, 1998). The entire issue of this journal, published by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is devoted to Teller and includes an evaluative commentary, long biographical article, list of his honors, bibliography of his writings, and time line of his life.

Teller, Edward. Energy from Heaven and Earth. San Francisco, Calif.: W. H. Freeman, 1979. Based on lectures delivered by Teller in Israel, the United States, and Nova Scotia in 1975. The chapters deal with petroleum, coal, fusion, and solar energy, in a lay guide to the value and quantity and prospect of energy sources for the future. Valuable chapter of Teller’s reminiscences about his work at Los Alamos in the development of the atom bomb.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Pursuit of Simplicity. Malibu, Calif.: Pepperdine University Press, 1981. Based on lectures given in 1978-1979, in which Teller rhapsodizes about the promise of technology in solving energy shortage problems and in freeing human beings to do more creative work. Teller repeats his call for openness in science and a strong defense, and delivers a number of interesting anecdotes about his scientific colleagues.

Teller, Edward, with Allen Brown. The Legacy of Hiroshima. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1962. An extended account of Teller’s work on the atom bomb; includes his prescriptions for being an optimist in the nuclear age. Teller maintains that proper civil defense procedures can ensure the survival of the United States in a limited nuclear war. He also calls for the establishment of a world government to guarantee freedom for the people of the world.

Teller, Edward, with Judith L. Shoolery. Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2001. Teller reflects on his long career, during which he participated in some of the most important technological developments of the century, knew the greatest scientists (among them Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and John von Neumann), and mixed in the politics of Cold War nuclear arms. With many photographs.

York, Herbert F. The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller and the Superbomb. San Francisco, Calif.: W. H. Freeman, 1976. York was the first director of the newly established Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and worked on the development of the hydrogen bomb. He believes that Teller was wrong in his insistence on building the fusion device and that Oppenheimer was correct in that the hydrogen bomb led to a dramatic and dangerous increase in the arms race with the Soviet Union. An insider’s view, somewhat dated, at odds with Teller’s recommendations.