Edward Teller
Edward Teller built the hydrogen bomb and destroyed a colleague's career doing it. Born in Budapest in 1908 to a Jewish family, he lost part of a foot in a Munich streetcar accident, took his doctorate under Heisenberg at Leipzig, and left Germany in 1933. He was among the first recruits to Los Alamos, and was a difficult one. Assigned to implosion calculations, he refused the work and pursued instead the Super — a weapon using a fission bomb to ignite fusion in hydrogen, which he had begun thinking about in 1942 and which he was convinced was the real prize. Bethe took over his group. The Soviet test of 1949 gave him his opening. Truman authorised a crash programme in 1950 over the opposition of the General Advisory Committee, chaired by Oppenheimer, which had called the weapon genocidal. The design that worked came in 1951 from Stanislaw Ulam, who proposed staging — compressing the fusion fuel with radiation from the fission primary. Teller saw how to do it properly. The Teller-Ulam configuration is still the basis of every thermonuclear weapon, and the two men disputed the credit permanently. At Oppenheimer's security hearing in 1954 he testified that he would feel safer with the security of the country in other hands. The scientific community largely stopped speaking to him. He founded the Livermore laboratory, championed nuclear excavation, opposed test bans, and sold Reagan on the Strategic Defense Initiative. He died in 2003. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom weeks before his death, and remained unrepentant about the 1954 testimony.
- Lived: 1908 CE – 2003 CE
- Nationality: Hungarian
- Roles: physicist, scientist
