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Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics

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In the interests of full disclosure, I will note from the first that I am Edward Teller's son-in-law, and something of a fan. I am also a physicist, however, trained in Urbana, and my views on Dr. Teller and the controversies surrounding him antedate my meeting him (and his daughter) by over a decade.

It being the first review of Teller's book on amazon.com, I read F. Sweet's review with some interest. I especially liked the material he 'added' to the book. The story about communist soldiers urinating in Teller's mother's favorite potted palm is a great story, but it isn't in the book. As far as I know it simply isn't true. Neither does Teller recount how his anti-communism began during the brief communist government period in his native Hungary when he was a child.

Indeed, on pages 181-183 of the book, Teller goes into some detail about how his feelings toward communism developed, which was surprising to me for how *late* it occurred. Some quotations from these pages are of interest:

'I had ambivalent feelings about the experiment going on in Russia.' [This about 1930]

'My first indication that something about the communist world was peculiar came in 1931 [at age 23].'

'But I still had not made up my mind. Charles Critchfield, one of our graduate students at George Washington, remembers that as late as 1937 I believed that the experiment in Russia might be the answer to that nation's political and economic problems.'

The seminal events leading to Teller's ultimate rejection of communism, as recounted in the book, were the show trials and executions of the 1930s, the arrest of friend and fellow physicist Lev Landau in Russia in 1938 or 1939, and reading Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon', published in 1938, which marked that author's profound change of mind from strong pro-communist to equally strong anti-communist. My own political views (libertarian), for example, were formed at a much younger age.

On another topic, Oppenheimer's career was not ruined by Teller. Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked because of his lying in security interviews during the 1940s, at least according to Dr. Gordon Gray, who chaired the three-member panel and cast the deciding vote. After his security clearance was revoked, Oppenheimer was head of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton for many years, a prestigious post that would be the capstone of anyone's career. Teller spends considerable time discussing the hearing and his testimony and its aftermath, and includes his testimony verbatim in an appendix.

It is true that Oppenheimer had no more influence over US nuclear weapons policy, for which I am very grateful. (...)

The left has (...) never gotten over the discovery that Soviet communism was not a good system, and that Joseph Stalin was not a nice person. Teller came to these conclusions during the late 1930s; the left's hero, Andre Sakharov, came to the same conclusions over 20 years later, after providing the tyrant with the hydrogen bomb. How did the man who provided the hydrogen bomb to the West come to be so reviled by the left, while Stalin's arms designer was beatified? Was he right too early?

Ah, well. Even at 92, Edward Teller can still drive the left completely over the top. The large controversies with which he has been associated over the last 60 years provide plenty of room for reasoned disagreement and principled discussion. People on both sides of the great political issues affecting science (or should that be the great scientific issues affecting politics?) should find this book of interest for the clarity with which it expresses Teller's world view and how it developed.

Mr. Sweet does give credit for the quality of the writing in the book, which is, I suspect, due in no small part to Judy Shoolery. I picked it up and burned through all 569 pages in two days over a weekend, and couldn't put the darned thing down. Teller brings the names of the great men whose work I studied in undergraduate and graduate school to life with stories, amusing anecdotes, and great sorrows as well.

Now, it must be said that I am in fact a biased reviewer, but it is hard to claim that I am any more biased than Mr. Sweet. Readers who wish a more evenhanded treatment of the book than perhaps either one of us has managed would be well-advised to consult the review in the November issue of Physics Today (which is also posted on their website) by Hans Bethe, who was present for many of the events related in the book and can therefore speak from personal knowledge. Bethe also stood on the other side of many of the great controversies from Teller; together they are the last two of the great age of physics, one on either side of a large political divide.

It is unfortunate that several reviews of this book in leading newspapers have belittled the man who is Edward Teller, as well as his career. Such reviews tell more about the reviewer than they do about Teller's memoirs, which are absolutely fascinating.

Edward Teller had the good fortune to be right where major work in physics was taking place throughout his career. When the hotbed of physics research was in Hungary, he was in Hungary; when it was in Germany, he was in Germany; when it was in England, he was in England, and when it finally moved to America, so did Edward Teller.

A man who is obviously passionate about applying scientific knowledge to solve problems, Teller decided long ago that consequences are for politicians to handle, scientists should only be concerned with furthering mankind's knowledge to the best of their ability.

This, Teller has done in remarkable fashion, and his memoirs allow you to tag along for the ride as he and others perform the mental gymnastics necessary to unlock the secrets of the atom. Far from being a dry technical treatise, however, Teller and Shoolery are surprisingly good at detailing the personalities behind the people, including those of Neils Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer (whose first name is Julius, we discover in the book), Enrico Fermi, Lev Landau and others whom most of us have only read about in passing when we were in school. We are also permitted to glimpse more than a few touching moments with his late wife Mici and his son, which reveal the depth of his affection.

He also delves into the political proclivities of his associates, a surprising number of which had socialist and communist tendencies. An appendix gives relevant portions of his testimony during the Congressional investigation into Robert Oppenheimer.

And the book doesn't concentrate on the atom bomb, either. Teller's career covers collaboration on an inherently safe nuclear reactor using hydride fuel (which we still are not yet using for electrical power production in the United States) to work on several ballistic missile defense systems from smart rocks to brilliant pebbles (which, we learn in the book, would protect the entire northern hemisphere -- including Russia -- if deployed). And at the end of the book, Teller gives us his view on where science, people and politics should go from here.

If you have an inquisitive bone in your body, you will thoroughly enjoy this book. All things considered, it is one of the best I've read in a long time. It's a shame that those who differ with Teller's point of view on some issues chose to take it out on his memoirs. This book is fascinating -- but I already said that, didn't I.

If you have an interest in the history of science
and technology, and in the scientific personalities who
carried out the revolution in physics in the first
half of the 20th century, you will be captivated
by this book.

I picked it up because of my interest in
the history of physics, and because Teller has
held such a central role in the transformation
from small science to Big Science.
Hans Bethe, with whom Teller had some difficulties
during the Manhattan Project, reviewed the book
very positively in Physics Today. I was prepared
to continue to dislike Teller, because of his testimony
in the Oppenheimer hearings and his advocacy of Star
Wars, but he nevertheless quickly won me over.

Teller comes across, in his own account, as a
collegial, cooperative, driven man, who cared
greatly about both his scientific and technical work
and his relations with his colleagues.
After Teller's 1954 testimony at the Oppenheimer
security clearance hearing, Teller was vilified.
Here, he gets to explain why he testified as he
did, and how it was just one of several very
stupid things that he did in his career. (The
stupid thing in this case was to neglect to
explain that his uncertainty about Oppenheimer's
clearance was due to a transcript he was shown
about Oppenheimer's fabricated story
that implicated his friend Chevalier, and
not to Oppenheimer's opposition to development
of the H-bomb, which was widely shared among
physics academics.)

Teller makes an effort to explain the scientific
challenges in his work, such as in the early
days of quantum mechanics when he worked on
molecular dynamics. For example, he explains
Landau's reaction to what is now called the
Jahn-Teller effect (and which Teller says should be
called the "Landau-Jahn-Teller effect"), giving the
basic physical principle involved and the reason for
Landau's initial puzzlement.

Teller played an important role after WW2 in
setting up the engineering principles necessary
to make nuclear reactors safe, and in getting them
implemented.

There are many delightful anecdotes, and even
some poems that Teller wrote. His lifelong friend
Maria Goppert Mayer saved all his letters, and
these provided much material that Teller
used to refresh his memory and select from.

I found the period from 1946 until the establishment
of Livermore Lab particularly interesting and
suspenseful. This book leaves no doubt that
Teller led a fascinating life.

"Memoirs", by Dr. Edward Teller, is a straight forward telling of the life of one of the twentieth century's foremost physicists. Dr. Teller describes his exodus from his native Hungary to Germany, Denmark, England and finally the United States. He has worked in the company of some of the great physicists of all time, Fermi, Bohr, Von Neumann and others. He was also instrumental in developing the atomic and hydrogen bombs as well as Los Alamos and Lawrence-Livermore national laboratories.

This book is not an apology for his work in atomic energy, weapons or his testimony regarding Oppenheimer. Dr. Teller goes into great detail to describe his thinking and motives in these areas. Having escaped the Nazi's and communists his right of center views on nuclear deterrence and missile defense are well founded. He discusses being ostracized from the scientific community, views on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, as well as his political and scientific contributions to among others Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan.

The book is extensively footnoted; Dr. Teller uses his teaching skills to describe to the reader the concepts being discussed in the body of the work. A basic knowledge of the terms used in physics is helpful but not necessary. The book is exceptionally well written and doesn't get "bogged down" in scientific jargon.

"Memoirs" is a fascinating documentary of the birth and development of nuclear energy in both its destructive and constructive forms. Dr. Teller is straight forward but modest about his role and generous in praise of his many colleagues.

This is the English major's review, that is, the review of someone not particularly interested in science or politics. Bought the book because I heard Savage interview Sam Cohen a few years ago and wanted to revisit those racy psychological bits. I mistakenly picked up "Memoirs" and struggled to get through the first quarter with its geeky tea-and-ping-pong interludes, which read like my ninety-year-old grandfather after a glass of port at the Thanksgiving table. Teller's dictation style of authorship is not intimate, and my stylistic gripes return toward the end of the book when he relates how such-and-such a captain of industry and his charming wife hosted them, etc. and in the generally weak epilogue.

But, wow, sometimes I couldn't turn pages fast enough. Where can you go to match this? "We all were lying on the ground, supposedly with our backs turned to the explosion. But I had decided to disobey that instruction and instead looked straight at the bomb." Tolstoy, maybe. The best memoirs, as with the best fiction, give clues to the great question of how to live and explore strands of fate, choice, history. For (fictional) characters of cognitive complexity and depth, one could consider Hamlet-or Teller's portrayal of Oppenheimer and Bohr.

The book nurtured me with throw-away comments one might do well to adopt as life philosophies: "Bohr was the embodiment of complementarity, the insistence that every important question has opposite sides that appear mutually exclusive; understanding of the question becomes possible only if the reality on both sides is acknowledged." At a certain point I began mining the memoirs as if reading wisdom literature. Bohr's definition of an expert, as "one who, from his own painful experiences, has discovered all the mistakes one can commit in a very narrow field," Lawrence on risk-taking, Teller's experience of shunning, the recognition of right of dissent, opposition of elitism and limitations on knowledge, all are worthy of reflection because they result from pressurized experience.

Sometimes you get the feeling that Edward Teller is simply making too many excuses. Maybe he is making them to preserve his record for posterity. A man who measured his influence by the number of enemies he had, he probably would not make excuses to justify his actions to his detractors. Given this stance, Teller was surprisingly thin-skinned, and unintended slights could cut him to the quick.
Yet you also get the feeling that Teller is being apologetic, that he wants to, but cannot quite admit, that personal misgivings and ambitions frequently coloured his massive and extraordinarily powerful rational power of thinking, that behind the domineering presence, there is hidden a sensitive man, larger than life and generous with his friends, who simply was overwhelmed by his alter egos. Unfortunately, when you are as brilliant and vocal as Teller, your mistakes leave a much bigger mark on history than those of lesser mortals, and you cannot erase the voices that the will emerge from the void of the future that will judge you. Those voices would speak to the mute volume of memoirs that Teller penned towards the end of his years, as a heroic and unique survivor of an extraordinary time.

No scientist in the latter half of the twentieth century has exercised so much influence over governments and the arms race as Teller. No scientist has been maligned so much for his actions. And yet Teller's life began in innocence, in fair Budapest in 1908, when the world was a much different place. When he died in 2003, it had profoundly changed, and Teller was no small contributor to that change. Teller's childhood was marked by a deeply ingrained hatred of communism, inculcated by the regimes that were toppling democracy and enforcing the rule of force in Hungary. Teller was not alone in having these resentments; his compatriots John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Theodor von Karman, and Leo Szilard also felt them. All would become exceptionally brilliant scientists, all would flee from totalitarianism and immigrate to the United States, all would be instrumental in the making of the atomic bomb and the harnessing of the nuclear genie, yet nobody would demonstrate a temperament as volatile and emotional as Teller and nobody would have such far-reaching influences that would define a period of turmoil and imminent catastrophe. Teller's descriptions of his childhood make heartwarming reading, they speak of a lost time and place, the idyllic and innocent paradise of central and Eastern Europe, which would get heartbreakingly devastated and permanently marred in a few years. Teller talks with painful affection about his childhood friends, many of whom perished in the concentration camps in World War 2. He tries to hide the agony of being different and special in a matter of fact tone, sometimes laced with humour, and with affectionate Hungarian poems; throughout his life, Teller retained a great appreciation of literature and poetry, and was a pianist of almost professional caliber.

Many months back, I compared Teller to Otto Octavius of Spiderman-2 fame in a post, in which I summarized the details of his life. Teller grew in fame and achievements through definitive decades of the century- as a graduate student with Werner Heisenberg, as a professor in England and in the United States, and finally, as the foremost and most enthusiastic proponent and designer of nuclear weapons that probably will ever be born. During this time, he rubbed shoulders, and also fell from the graces of, the greatest minds of the century- along with his fellow Hungarians, Teller stood with Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, and scores of others. He went down in history as Leo Szilard's chauffer; he drove Szilard to meet Einstein, the meeting in which the eminent physicist wrote the now famous letter warning President Roosevelt of the discovery of nuclear fission, and the ominous possibility of the Nazis building an atomic bomb. After this incident, Teller, more than anyone else, worked to make US authorities aware of the gravity of the situation. It is an amusing irony of politics and history that is was not American scientists but `enemy aliens' from Europe who egged the US Government on to pursue the development of atomic energy.

Teller's journey into fame and infamy, into endearment and notoriety, began with his work on the Manhattan Project. In the summer of 1942, at Oppenheimer's beckoning, he joined an elite and small group of physicists who worked out the basic physics of atomic weapons in Oppenheimer's office at the University of California, Berkeley. While the other participants, including Hans Bethe, pursued the elusive goal of trying to achieve an explosion that would shine brighter than a thousand suns, Teller was distracted by the power of the sun itself; whether instead of fission, one could achieve nuclear fusion by using the energy of a fission weapon, thus harnessing the source of energy that has kept the sun burning for billions of years. Needless to say, this was distracting at a time when the fission bomb was far from being a reality. Another time, Teller raised the ominous possibility of the atmosphere getting ignited by an atomic explosion, a possibility that was quickly shown to be `almost impossible' by the thoroughgoing Hans Bethe.
During the Manhattan Project, Teller was outraged when he was passed over by Oppenheimer to be director of the theoretical division, the key section of the project. Oppenheimer instead chose Bethe, who was much more consistent and meticulous, and not given to wild, if brilliant, fantasizing like Teller. When Teller refused to work on the complex implosion calculations that were necessary for the atomic bomb, the patient Oppenheimer formed a group for Teller to pursue his own ideas on fusion. This created a gap in the fission group, a gap that had to be filled with three or four other scientists to compensate for the brilliant Hungarian's abilities. From this time on, in spite of some valuable contributions, Teller created more problems than solved them. His late-night piano playing did not help. As was aptly put, "Teller managed to keep more Nobel Laureates awake than he could have done at any other place in the world".
Teller was brilliant beyond words, but highly erratic and inconsistent, volatile and moody, and somewhat sloppy in his calculations. These were qualities that would define his persona and his actions in crucial times to come. As a scientist put it, "Nine out of ten of Teller's ideas are bad. He needs other more methodical people to bring the tenth idea to fruition, which is usually a stroke of genius"

After the war, while most of his colleagues withdrew from atomic research or pursued arms disarmament, Teller became a hawk and a vehement anti-communist. He was enormously helped by the political climate of the times, and rode on the emotions of the zealous anti-communists in the state department. In his pursuit of the hydrogen bomb, which he deemed necessary to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating the world, he became an obsessive fanatic. In spite of this, when he lobbied vigorously in 1949 for the government to support a crash program for development of that awesome and horrible weapon, he had no technical proof that it would work. The proof came in 1950, largely supplied by a brooding, reserved and brilliant Polish émigré mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam. The division of credit between Teller and Ulam as to the crucial idea which made the H-bomb work, is part of nuclear and historical folklore and debate, and I would not delve into it right now because it would be a colourful topic for another post. It is a constant controversy that never seems to die, although now most people believe that it was Ulam who at least was solely responsible for the initial idea; that of using the enormous compression supplied by an atomic weapon to efficiently and successfully cause nuclear fusion. Ulam seems to have thought of shock waves that would do this, while Teller quickly realized that the radiation from the fission explosion would do the job much more quickly. Whatever the case was, Teller has never given due credit to Ulam in public, and has proudly worn the epithet of `father of the H-bomb' on his lapel (Bethe has drolly remarked that Teller should actually be the `mother of the H-bomb' because he carried the baby for so long...)

It is also to Teller's discredit that the US detonated their first fusion behemoth in 1952, thus frustrating the efforts of many to bring about a moratorium on testing that would have stalled Soviet H bomb development. Many also believe that Teller actually encouraged that development with his insistence on an early test; the radioactive fallout from an H-bomb test contains the characteristic signature of the design of the bomb, which could have made the Russians aware of the crucial idea of compression.

Teller's damning testimony at Robert Oppenheimer's infamous security hearing in 1954 also has become part of nuclear folklore that has rankled deep. While allegations that Oppenheimer actually hampered H-bomb development have now been shown to be false and misunderstood based on recently declassified documents (Priscilla McMillan, 2005), and while allegations about his loyalty were too far-fetched and preposterous to be considered anyway, Oppenheimer's bizarre testimony a few years before about a left leaning friend that cost the friend his career, was apparently seen by Teller as a betrayal. Later, Teller justified his testimony against Oppenheimer as a reinforcement of his ideals of not behaving ambiguously with friends. He seems to have overlooked the fact that his testimony itself had a calculated ambiguity which turned out to have devastating consequences that cost Oppenheimer his security clearance. In the years that followed, Teller's true intentions and behaviour have never been fully explained, and he never chose to do that in interviews, but whatever the facts, recently Teller has been appearing more and more as the villain in a period which all too resembled the current age of neo-conservative coercion and informal totalitarianism.

In the years after the hearing, Teller suffered a fallout with most of his friends in the community, who had testified on the brilliant Oppenheimer's behalf. But given the political climate of the times, Teller had no problem in endearing himself to hawks in the government who greatly valued his espousal of the development of grotesquely absurd and powerful weapons of destruction, and his belligerent anti-communist policies. Teller embraced and was one of the key forces behind both the putative anti-ballistic missile system of 1960 and the much debated Star Wars system of the 1980, both of which could not materialize because of the efforts of dedicated scientists and administrators who showed the technical and financial futility of the systems, and the escalation of the arms race that they would engender. But even today, proponents of National Missile Defense (the `son of Star-Wars') seem to be in the shadow of Teller's ghost.

Why am I talking about all this, instead of talking about Teller's book? Because for a man as complex and influential as Teller, one hopes that he would be demystified at least to some extent through his own book, written at a time when he could be expected to have very different perspectives on the life he has lived and the times in which he participated. Many people think Teller is emphatically answerable to history. Many activists in the 60s and 70s even labeled him as a war criminal. They think that he should justify all the heretofore-mentioned actions. Many hate him and would like to see his reputation permanently soiled. Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi, one of the clearest and most authoritative consciences of the nuclear age, actually said that we would have been better off if Teller had never been born. Whatever Edward Teller says, his friends as well as foes would be most eager to hear.

Unfortunately, I believe he fails to make a case in the book, which is otherwise extremely readable and an important document that is an ode to a remarkable age, written by one of its most important observers and participants. Most of his statements are as ambiguous as the testimony he rendered for Oppenheimer (an incident on which he predictably spends more time in the book than on any other in his life). Quite upsettingly, the book appears as another series of excuses and partial and foggy explanations that would possibly serve to absolve him. But I believe that Edward Teller had always had a very big problem saying sorry. While he does make an effort at apology for a few of his actions, I think that the weight of history is too much upon his shoulders for him to shrug it off in a massive admission of culpability. This is unfortunate, since Teller craved attention all his life, wanted to be part of the establishment and wanted to appease his friends. In the end, he probably found it much easier to be part of the anti-establishment (which ironically is usually called the establishment). He would rather face history's accusations than be ordinary. Which seems to be another misfortune, because Teller would not have been ordinary by any standards, even if he had chosen a different path in life. One suspects that if he had spent half the time he spent in weapons advocacy, in doing serious science instead, he would have stood in the same pantheon as Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe, both Nobel laureates. The few books on physics which he has penned are a delight to read. His passion for physics and his astonishing understanding of it shines through untrammeled. He had ideas that were flowing, a tremendously fertile imagination, and an astoundingly creative mind. He made important contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, and collaborated with some of the most important scientists of the century.
But he was not a team player. He frequently let his emotions override his rational intentions, and then became inadvertently, a slave to the consequences fostered by them. He wanted to be in the driver's seat all the time, where he could run the show surrounded by a bunch of yes-men. He was extremely ambitious, but finally ended up becoming more infamous than famous. He sank into the spiral generated by his own brilliance and his beliefs that came about by a complex combination of his fierce anti-communism, the traumas of his childhood, and his unique perception of the world around him. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he lived in a time and place where he could make an enormous difference. Maybe it is fitting that not Bill Clinton but George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, two months before his death.

And yet, in the end, what one remembers is the early part of the book, when Teller talks fondly about his time in Hungary, in Germany, in Rome and England, and in the Unites States. He talks about his lifelong friendships with Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, and John von Neumann. He warmly recounts the trip when he and his wife had to amusingly watch Hans Bethe's preoccupation with his future wife, Rose; apparently, Bethe had met Rose earlier, and in 'ten minutes' had fallen desperately in love with her, and the couple wanted to get to know each other as well as possible during the trip. Teller gives us rare peeks into the human side of revered scientific giants.
Again, through the thicket of emotions, prejudices, and justifications, one can catch glimpses of the sensitive Teller, the Teller who was generous to his true friends almost to a fault, was warm to his students, and was a model of scientific integrity. The Teller who was loved by his colleagues and friends before his altercations with them, the Teller who sounds like a champion of freedom when he talks about his ideas for world government, the Teller who proposed to his childhood sweetheart Mici in the presence of cackling geese on the banks of the Danube...one wonders what happened to that Teller in later years, why he lay dormant, what those years of mistrust and dissent did to him. One feels sorry for the great man, but one also feels a sense of unwanted resentment towards him. In the end, no matter how eloquently he advocates his causes, it would be best to say that Edward Teller was complicated, and leave it at that yet again. Let that encompass all of him.

I am only 12 years old, but believe me when I say that this is one of the best books I've ever read! I had to do a report on a scientist for school and I chose Edward Teller because I had heard of him from my mother and he sounded interesting. Rather than being just another boring book report, I really did enjoy this book. It gave me a lot of information for my report and was not incredibly hard to read. I decided to do a movie for my report and filmed it as if Teller were writing journal entries. I got a 100++ on my project which is what I would give this book...a 100++!

Edward Teller was the 'father' of the hydrogen bomb, and this autobiography describes his odyssey through the 20th century, from his childhood in Hungary and his insights on the two World Wars to his relationship with scientists and his contributions to the development of atomic weaponry. Chapters present an excellent overview of his sometimes controversial views on nuclear weapons usage.

From the enormous flood of books, the 3Memoirs2 of Edward Teller is unique, awaited so long, and presenting the story of most important science and the application of nuclear energy. This refers to his involvement with cautious and very responsible design of the first nuclear power stations in the world, as well as the story of nuclear weapons. A long number of reflections on life and politics of the just finished twentieth century alone are most valuable to read. The book documents what not all insiders in the fields may have realized before reading, what the media highlighted when nominating the two greatest scientist of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein and Edward Teller.
Teller is one of the last witnesses of the great development of quantum mechanics after 1925. As Ph.D. student and assistant of Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig and in contact with Niels Bohr, Teller presents an authentic summary of the views of Bohr and Heisenberg. Recently the Copenhagen Interpretation received critical modifications (John L. Casti, 3Paradigmas Lost2 1989), and the more mathematical interpretation may to too formal how Heisenberg1s matrix elements as solutions of integral equations correspond to the eigenvalues of Schödinger1s differential equations (Hermann Weyl 1932) with Born1s interpretation of distribution functions (see. Appendix A of H. Hora, Plasmas at High Temperature and Density, S. Roderer, Regensburg, 2000). In this respect, Teller teaches the Bohr-Heisenberg picture with critical but golden explanations. Bohr1s trinity of ideas are: atoms are found in stable and unchanging quantum states, paradoxies are essential for science, contradictions when founded cannot be changed but must be reconciled.
Taking the statistical behavior of radioactivity, quantum physics cannot be interpreted by classical physics though classical physics may be necessary as access. 3Although we cannot change the past, we can know it. But according to the new theory of the atoms, the future is undetermined and therefore truly unknowable. We can change it, but we cannot know it, at least not completely.3 And Teller says generally: 3I believe that the only way to learn from history is to consider what was and what might have been.2
It is unbelievable what ashamed hurdles were in the USA when developing the H-bomb as the only entity to save the world from Stalin1s world war III planned by him for mid 1953 what may have led to a global extension of his communistic totalitarism. Teller1s H-bomb worked before that of the Russians with their long years extensive efforts by the brightest physicists. Teller1s success may have saved the free world.
Nearly all main discoveries how to build the bomb were initiated by Teller. His support was by very few persons only, beginning with President Truman, Senator Brian McMahon, an Admiral 3damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead2 (p. 311), and some members of the GEC of the AEC e.g. Henry De Wolfe Smyth or Lewis Strauss. Teller acknowledges the cooperation with few excellent scientists as John A. Wheeler, John von Neumann, Maria Göppert-Mayer, Freddy de Hoffman etc., and encouragement by Ernest O. Lawrence and very few other prominent colleagues. The obstruction of Teller1s work by a huge majority of influential persons, not only J. Robert Oppenheimer, but very much more persons in key positions responsible for saving the United States from Stalin1s aggression as Carson Mark or Norris Bradbury and many others, is documented.
The intolerable rumors spread by Los Alamos people all the time in favor of Ulam - whose continuous criticism against the H-bomb is documented - are clarified: Teller and Ulam documented in 1949 their simultaneous ideas that compression of the fusion material is the solution. The essential point, however, why the re-absorption of the radiation within the reaction is the key property (p. 313) based on the better exponent for the density dependence, stems from Teller. The question of compression was a key point also for the Russians, discovered only in 1954, and is similar to the compression for the laser fusion with volume ignition (Zeitschr. f. Naturforschung A33, 890 (1978)).
It is well known how scientist are not the best managers, especially where their own scientific ambitions run into a conflict of interests. How this was happening in connection with the crucial strategic developments in the United States is a rather unique documentation by Teller who managed to succeed only very narrowly.
After President Truman ordered the work on the H-bomb 1949, Teller could combine the April/May 1951 nuclear tests on the Enivetok Atoll with his initial concept to put condensed deuterium-tritium in the center of an atomic explosion. The observed exothermic fusion reaction, measured by the 50 meter distant reactions of the fast neutrons producing protons, was the first manmade fusion energy device. Teller1s second H-bomb test in 1952 (developed against the machinations of his superiors at Los Alamos) used then fusion fuel less expensive than deuterium tritium.
Teller1s book gives an elaborated answer whether scientists should work for defense projects. He gave a chamber music performance at UCLA and was greeted 3you would better have become a musician2 by a professor who is known as a notorious enemy of defense research. Similar emotions offended Nobel Laureate Charles Townes as Professor in Berkeley (see his book 3How the Laser Happened2). He was with Wernher von Braun a promoter of President Kennedy1s project of the moon landings. They had the worst opponents from the scientific community. Nobel Laureate Max Born declared 1967 that the moon landing will not be possible before 2000. Now we have to ask after September 11th, where would have been the advanced technologies to fight terrorism without defense research? When Teller initiated to launch SDI by President Reagan, there were so many high profile scientist like Hans Bethe and other Nobel Laureates who ridiculed these developments similar to Teller1s work for the H-bomb. People may have forgotten that SDI finished the cold war, liberated many peoples from communism and is bringing together a democratic Russia with the free world.