István Hargittai
Edward Teller—
Guardian of Freedom or
Dr. Strangelove?
[...]
The years 1949–1950 were a time of awakenings, tragically combined with the
rise of Joseph McCarthy's star in the U.S. Senate. McCarthy misused his position
and authority to spread fear and to level baseless accusations of Communist
conspiracies even within such venerable institutions as the State Department and
the U.S. Army.
From 1947 on, the U.S. monitored the atmosphere for unusual radioactivity; this
vigilance yielded a spectacular dividend in 1949, when a Soviet nuclear explosion
was detected. On January 27, 1950, the Americans learned from the British that one
of their physicists at Los Alamos during the war, Klaus Fuchs, had passed nuclear
secrets to the Soviets. On June 25, North Korea invaded South Korea. Senator
McCarthy's first charges about Communist infiltration of the State Department
were made on February 9, 1950. When Teller heard about the Soviet nuclear explosion,
he called the former scientific director of Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer to
ask, "What do we do now?"1 Although Teller knew that Oppenheimer had opposed
the development of thermonuclear weapons, the former director of Los Alamos still
represented authority for him. Oppenheimer brushed him off by saying, "Keep your
shirt on." At this point, Oppenheimer ceased to be a yardstick for Teller because he
was convinced that this was a new situation, calling for immediate action.
Edward Teller had a historic role in facilitating the United States embarking on
a crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb. A brief summary here will help in
understanding the enormity of difficulties Teller had to overcome in fulfilling his
self-imposed task. The decision about such a program ultimately rested with the
president of the United States. He relied in part upon the recommendations of the
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). It was not a scientific body, but was assisted by
a nine-member General Advisory Committee, headed by Oppenheimer and
consisting of first-rate physicists, chemists and engineers. Teller was not a member
of this committee. He had some allies, however, outside of the committee. Ernest
O. Lawrence, the Nobel laureate discoverer/inventor of the cyclotron and his
subordinate, the future Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez sided with Teller in his crusade
to convince politicians and military leaders that the United States had to have the
hydrogen bomb. In the fall of 1949, the GAC came to its decision concerning the
development of the hydrogen bomb. It was not unanimous, but both the majority
and the minority opinion rejected the program of building a hydrogen bomb.
The majority opinion strongly recommended against an all-out effort to develop the
hydrogen bomb. It condemned it as a tool of genocide, which, of course, it is; it also
stated that "In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb, we see a
unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war
and thus limiting the fear and arousing the hope of mankind."2 (my italics)
Wonderful thoughts, but they reflect naiveté about and ignorance of Soviet
intentions and determinations. The minority report, signed by two Nobel laureate
leaders in physics, Fermi and Isidor I. Rabi, stated, "...we think it wrong on
fundamental ethical principles to initiate a program of development of such a
weapon. At the same time it would be appropriate to invite the nations of the world
to join us in a solemn pledge not to proceed in the development or construction of
weapons of this category."3 (my italics) Again, the naiveté and trust are staggering.
By then an accelerated Soviet program was underway.4
The Free World did not know about the weapons development in the Soviet
Union, and there was a tendency to underestimate the Soviets in general and the
Soviet physicists in particular. In the comfort of Western democracies, it was also
hard to imagine that there was no discussion in the Soviet Union about the
question of the development of the hydrogen bomb and that thousands of slave
workers would be used to complete the program under inhuman and unsafe
conditions. If not then, today it is ridiculous to maintain that the United States
could have stopped the development of the hydrogen bomb by its own example of
refraining from it. Relying on the recommendation of star scientists from GAC, the
Atomic Energy Commission voted to advise the President of the United States not
to decide on a crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb. President Truman
then asked for advice from his National Security Council (NSC) consisting of three
aides, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State and the Chairman of the
AEC. Teller and his colleagues had succeeded in their self-imposed task of alerting
the politicians and the generals about the looming danger of non-action. As a
result, the trend reversed in the NSC as it voted two to one in favor of the development.
It was a great victory for Teller when President Truman announced his
decision on January 31, 1950, giving directions to continue research on all atomic
weapons, including the hydrogen bomb. He augmented this decision in March
1950 with a secret directive to intensify work on the hydrogen bomb. It is
important to stress that after Truman's decision, all physicists that were needed
for the work, including some who had fiercely opposed it, quickly and without
duress converged on Los Alamos and resumed their research. Teller as a physicist
went on to play a decisive role in solving the scientific and technological problems
connected with the development of the hydrogen bomb. The mathematician
Stanislaw Ulam made comparable contributions, especially in moving beyond the
theoretical dead-end that at a certain point seemed to make the project hopeless.
In this, the relative weight of Teller and Ulam's contributions cannot yet be
assessed because the relevant documents are still classified.
It must have been lonely for Teller, even when a few others had joined him, to go
against the tide of the majority of his distinguished colleagues. It was not his first
experience of loneliness, and not the last either. There seems to be a discrepancy
between the perception of Teller the public figure and the figure that emerges from
a closer scrutiny of his life. The public perception of Teller is of someone fiercely
arrogant and headstrong, sure of himself, winning all his debates, someone of
strict principles that emanate from tremendous inner strength. However, it could
be argued just as convincingly that he craved acceptance by his peers, wanted to
please his superiors and was torn by self-doubt. I do not wish to imply that he was
misunderstood: he himself cultivated the public image he became identified with.
Donald Glaser tells about a flight he shared with Teller, on which they had an
amicable and meaningful conversation. However, after deplaning, in the presence
of an audience, Teller immediately put on a show of loud behaviour.5
Teller was teased and bullied by his classmates at the beginning of his
gimnázium years and strove to gain the friendship of his fellows. During the same
period, his virtually boundless respect for authority was inculcated in him by his
revered maternal grandfather, who taught him that laws must be obeyed without
exception. He never accepted that personal responsibility might override the law
even if it worked against one's conscience and never subscribed to the American
tradition of preferring to break a law rather than doing something against one's
conscience.6 This is why it is uncomfortable to imagine how Teller might have
conducted himself in a Soviet or a Japanese environment had he chosen to
emigrate eastward rather than westward after the Nazi takeover in Germany.
Teller enjoyed his years in Germany, where he flourished in the community of
physicists. He was never part of German society, but he was of the society of
German and other physicists, and this sufficed. Similarly, he felt very comfortable
during the second half of the 1930s at George Washington University in
Washington, D.C. There, George Gamow was his colleague, and many others
joined them for the annual meetings they organized in theoretical physics. When
Gamow characterized him as "helpful, willing, and able to work on other people's
ideas without insisting on everything having to be his own," he was referring to
this period. What a contrast to the Teller of later years!
Los Alamos at the time of the Manhattan Project was not to Teller's liking. There
were many more important physicists around him and he was relegated to a subordinate
role under his friend, Hans Bethe. He declined this role, and it was mainly
due to Oppenheimer's tactful approach to Teller's insistence on working only on the
fusion bomb that there was no major clash between Teller and other physicists.
Teller was never comfortable with Oppenheimer, but heeded his advice and declined
to sign the petition Szilard sent him that protested against deployment of the atomic
bombs in the summer of 1945. In Los Alamos, Teller also found solace in von
Neumann's friendship during the latter's periodic visits to the weapons laboratory.
After the war, Teller was dissatisfied with the performance of Los Alamos.
However, upon becoming Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago, in
spite of the prestige and comfort of the position, he could not find the
contentment in peacetime he had had at George Washington University before the
war. He was gradually becoming involved in politics. In addition to the
development of the hydrogen bomb, he fought for the establishment of a second
weapons laboratory (today the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). In this
quest for the second weapons laboratory, he teamed up, again, with Lawrence,
who was more right-wing than Teller, but was a better politician in that he tried
to avoid antagonizing his fellow physicists. Both Enrico Fermi and von Neumann
warned Teller against getting too close to Lawrence, but to no avail. Teller went
to California, and at Livermore, he was surrounded by many younger colleagues
whose jobs were largely due to him (i.e., to Teller).
Teller's ultimate loneliness came as a consequence of the role he played in
Robert Oppenheimer's security hearing. He could have declined to testify, or, if
he felt that impossible, he could have acted similarly to von Neumann, who was
not a great friend to Oppenheimer, but was diplomatic in his testimony. Instead,
Teller chose to be unambiguous in expressing his view that Oppenheimer was a
security risk. When I.I. Rabi sarcastically congratulated Teller on the "brilliance"
of his testimony and the "extremely clever way" in which he had expressed his
opinion that Oppenheimer was a security risk, it signified his third and final exile.
Rabi was a doyen of American physics, and he ignored Teller's proffered hand (just
as Mikhail Gorbachev did to Teller decades later).
Teller's first exile was from Hungary, from where he was driven out by anti-
Semitism and the lack of prospects for building a meaningful life. Hitler and
Nazism forced him out of Germany and Europe. Each of these first two exiles were
involuntary and both led to an improved situation and greater opportunities. The
third exile was different. It was a consequence of his own actions and it isolated
him from what was most important to him, the community of physicists. This
would have been difficult for any scientist, but it was especially hard on Teller as
he thrived on working in collaboration with others. Teller's great loss was
compounded by the deaths of Lawrence and von Neumann, as well as Wigner's
gradual marginalization. Szilard's death in 1964 was another blow. Szilard had
remained a friend to the end, in spite of them being political adversaries.
[...]
Soon after the appearance of Teller's Memoirs, Peter Goodchild published a book
on Teller entitled The Real Dr. Strangelove.7 Goodchild tends to rely on Teller's Memoirs and other publications, rather than original materials. The reference in the
title of the book is to Stanley Kubrick's 1964 movie, Dr. Strangelove or: How
I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It is about the start of a nuclear
holocaust and involves an insane ex-Nazi warmonger high in the echelons of the
United States high command. I do not think it fair to assign this label to Edward
Teller for the following reasons. As I have argued, the creation of the American
hydrogen bomb helped to prevent rather than to initiate a nuclear holocaust. Teller
was never a Nazi and thus could not become an ex-Nazi. Dr. Strangelove's irrational
behavior was not like Teller's at the time of the debate over whether to develop the
hydrogen bomb. It would be more difficult to avert such portrayal for Teller in the
debates about SDI or "Star Wars," but that came in the 1980s, long after the movie
was made. There have been other suggestions for a model for Dr. Strangelove, but
it seems more probable that the negative traits of several individuals were combined
in Strangelove, who has become a symbol of reckless warmongers.
[...]
Peter D. Lax on Edward Teller*
Peter Lax (b. in 1926 in Budapest) is a mathematician world renowed for his contributions to the
theory and applications of an important area, the partial differential equations. He is Professor
Emeritus and former director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
He was awarded the 2005 Abel Prize by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the most
prestigious award in mathematics. He received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1986.
The Lax family left Europe for the U.S. to escape the persecution of Jews, on December 5, 1941, for the
U.S. Still as a student, he enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II and joined the Manhattan Project
in Los Alamos in June 1945. In the following, slightly edited excerpts are presented from our conversations in
2005 and 2007.
How were you selected for the program?
All recruits, when we entered the Army, took a very detailed intelligence test, and it must have been the
result of that test.
What did you know about the Los Alamos project when you arrived?
Once we arrived there, they explained to us what they were doing. I came in a group of about 30 people.
When you learned about the project, were you shocked?
I was. They told us that they were building a bomb out of plutonium, an element that did not even exist
in the Universe, but they were manufacturing it in Hanford.
Did you realize at that point the role of the Hungarian scientists in initiating the program?
I did not; I only knew that Teller was there.
What did you do in Los Alamos?
I did a criticality study of an ellipsoidal assembly of explosives. There was a thought that uranium might
be shaped not as a sphere but as a slightly eccentric ellipsoid. That was a non-trivial study. Then, when
I got my PhD in 1949, I returned to Los Alamos and became interested in differential equations in
solving fluid dynamical problems.
The debates raged about the hydrogen bomb in 1949. You have stressed that Teller was right in the debate
about the hydrogen bomb because the Soviets would have built it anyway. Why do you think he is still
being ostracized for his role in this?
I don't know if he is regarded as a villain for that; I do know that he is regarded so for his role in the
Oppenheimer case. He really believed that Oppenheimer was an obstacle to the hydrogen bomb.
You stated somewhere that Teller brought Star Wars into the White House through the back door rather
than exposing it to a debate in the scientific community.
Yes. This is how I see it. Teller was a man of hundreds of ideas. Fermi said about him that he was a
monomaniac with many manias. Although many of his ideas were off the wall, he was always willing to
discuss his ideas with his colleagues. His tragedy was that due to his enormous success with the
hydrogen bomb, he became a member of the higher circles in Washington, who were not scientists and
who were unable to contradict him.
Do you think Star Wars was his idea or did he just play the front man to promote it?
I think he was the brain behind it even if there was a team at Livermore working on the project.
I. H.
[...]
1 
E. Teller (with Judith L. Shoolery), Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics.
Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001, p. 289.
2 See in full in G. T. Seaborg, A Chemist in the White House: From the Manhattan Project to the End
of the Cold War. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 1998, pp. 42–43.
3 Ibid.
4 I. Hargittai, M. Hargittai, Candid Science VI: More Conversations with Famous Scientists. Imperial
College Press, London, 2006, pp. 808–837 (Vitaly L. Ginzburg).
5 I. Hargittai, The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century. Oxford
University Press, New York, 2006, p. 224.
6 Ibid., p. 11.
7 P. Goodchild, Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2004.
* The full interview has appeared in Hungarian translation, István Hargittai, Magyar Tudomány, 2007
November, pp. 1466–1479; the original text in English is scheduled to appear in The Mathematical Intelligencer.
István Hargittai
is Professor of Chemistry at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
His most recent book is The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the
Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 2006 (soft cover edition, 2008).
