Edward Teller

• 1. Introduction

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  Edward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned. He stood and looked. He later described the flash as being like pulling open the curtain in a dark room and having broad daylight stream in. That image captures something essential about the man: a physicist drawn irresistibly toward the most powerful and dangerous light he could find.

  Born Ede Teller in Budapest on the 15th of January 1908, he would go on to become the figure the press called "the father of the hydrogen bomb". But the label barely begins to account for the breadth of what he touched: climate science, asteroid defense, nuclear reactor safety, and a plan to blast an artificial harbor out of Alaska. He was a man whose scientific imagination outran the politics of almost every room he entered, and whose personal history outran the politics of Europe itself. How did a boy who was a late talker and who entertained himself by calculating large numbers in his head become the most controversial scientist of the twentieth century? That is the thread this documentary follows.

• 2. From Budapest to Los Alamos

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  Teller left Hungary for Germany in 1926, driven partly by the discriminatory numerus clausus rule enforced under Miklós Horthy's government. He enrolled at the University of Karlsruhe to study mathematics and chemistry, earning a degree in chemical engineering. A visiting professor named Herman Mark changed his direction. Mark, an expert in polymer chemistry, lectured on molecular spectroscopy and made plain to Teller that new ideas in physics were radically altering the frontier of chemistry. The encounter was enough to convince Teller to switch fields.

  His father was so alarmed by the plan that he traveled to Karlsruhe to speak with the professors in person. A degree in chemical engineering led clearly to well-paying work; a physics degree led nowhere obvious. Teller was not told what was said in those conversations, but he came away with his father's permission to become a physicist.

  At the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Teller studied under Arnold Sommerfeld. In 1928, while still a student there, a streetcar nearly severed his right foot. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life, and sometimes wore a prosthetic foot. Werner Heisenberg later remarked that it was the hardiness of Teller's spirit, not simple stoicism, that let him cope. Teller chose to stop taking painkillers because they were interfering with his thinking. He convinced himself through an exercise of will that he had taken them when he had not, using what he described as the placebo effect.

  He transferred to Leipzig University, where Heisenberg supervised the doctoral dissertation he completed in 1930. The dissertation dealt with one of the first accurate quantum mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecular ion. That same year, he met the Russian physicists George Gamow and Lev Landau, and befriended the Czech physicist George Placzek. It was Placzek who arranged a summer stay with Enrico Fermi in Rome in 1932, the encounter that pointed Teller's career toward nuclear physics.

  When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Teller left with the help of the International Rescue Committee. He spent time in England and a year in Copenhagen under Niels Bohr. In February 1934 he married Augusta Maria Harkanyi, known as Mici, who was the sister of a friend. George Gamow's invitation brought Teller to George Washington University in 1935, where he and Gamow organized the Washington Conferences on Theoretical Physics every year from 1935 to 1947.

• 3. The Super and the Super's Troubles

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  At the Berkeley summer seminar in 1942, convened by Robert Oppenheimer to plan the Manhattan Project, Teller detoured the entire discussion. He had been talking with Fermi about atomic warfare, and Fermi had casually floated the notion that a fission weapon might ignite a larger fusion reaction. Teller was captivated. By the time the Berkeley session opened, he had already grown impatient with the idea of "just" an atomic bomb, even though that bomb did not yet exist. He began pushing for what he called the "Super", his early conception of a hydrogen bomb.

  He moved to Los Alamos in March 1943, was assigned the secret identity Ed Tilden, and was placed in the Theoretical Division under Hans Bethe. He was irritated at being passed over for the division's leadership. Oppenheimer assigned him to investigate unusual fission approaches, including autocatalysis and uranium hydride, both of which turned out to be impractical. Meanwhile, Teller kept pressing the Super idea and asked Maria Goeppert-Mayer to run calculations on it. She confirmed his own results: the design was not going to work.

  After the war, a conference at Los Alamos in April and May of 1946 reviewed the wartime work on the Super and concluded that Teller had been too optimistic. The quantities of deuterium required and the radiation losses during deuterium burning both undermined the concept. Teller submitted an optimistic summary anyway, arguing that further development should be encouraged.

  The real breakthrough came in 1951, when Teller and Stanislaw Ulam proposed a new design in a classified paper titled On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors. The apparent key was separating the fission and fusion components and using X-rays from the fission stage to compress the fusion fuel before igniting it. Who deserves credit for which part of that idea has remained disputed ever since. In a 1999 interview with Scientific American, Teller said flatly that Ulam "did not" contribute the core idea, and that Ulam had been "willing to sign a paper" but then "refused" to defend it or work on it. Ulam, for his part, said Teller had merely produced "a more generalized" version of his original design. Hans Bethe called Teller's contribution "a stroke of genius" in 1954 but used that praise to argue that no additional money could have sped up the development.

• 4. The Oppenheimer Hearing

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  In 1954, at the Atomic Energy Commission security clearance hearing for J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller made a choice that ended many of his friendships and permanently marked his reputation in the scientific world. He was the only member of the scientific community to testify that Oppenheimer should not be granted clearance.

  Asked by AEC attorney Roger Robb whether he was suggesting Oppenheimer was disloyal, Teller was careful with his words. He said he assumed Oppenheimer was loyal and would continue to assume so until he saw conclusive proof otherwise. But he also testified that he had seen Oppenheimer act in ways that were "exceedingly hard to understand", and that he would personally feel more secure if public matters rested in other hands.

  Teller additionally testified that Oppenheimer had been an outstanding director of Los Alamos with a "very quick mind", before laying out the ways in which Oppenheimer had, in his view, obstructed the thermonuclear program. By framing a disagreement about scientific priorities as a matter touching on security, Teller handed critics a lever to pry Oppenheimer out of public life. Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked. A congressional aide subsequently accused Oppenheimer of being a Soviet spy.

  Afterward, Robert Christy, who had made the solid-pit bomb design a reality, refused to shake Teller's hand in a widely noted incident. Teller later insisted that his testimony had not significantly harmed Oppenheimer, and in 2002 he maintained that Oppenheimer had been removed from policy matters but had not been "destroyed". Documentary evidence muddied his account: six days before the hearing, Teller had met with an AEC liaison officer and suggested deepening the charges. Historian Richard Rhodes concluded that AEC chairman Lewis Strauss had already decided to revoke the clearance regardless, but Teller's testimony was the most damaging of all, and he bore the consequences in the form of lasting ostracism from much of the physics community.

• 5. Nuclear Power, Climate, and Controversy

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  Teller helped establish nuclear reactor safety standards as chair of the Reactor Safeguard Committee to the AEC in the late 1940s, and in the late 1950s he led work at General Atomics on a reactor design in which a nuclear meltdown would be impossible. The resulting TRIGA reactor, standing for Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomic, has been built and used in hundreds of hospitals and universities around the world.

  In December 1957, Teller stood before the American Chemical Society and warned that burning fossil fuels since the mid-nineteenth century had raised the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He described the gas as acting "in the same way as a greenhouse" and said he had calculated that a ten percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide could melt an appreciable portion of the polar ice caps. Two years later, at a symposium marking the centennial of the American oil industry organized by the American Petroleum Institute and the Columbia Graduate School of Business, he told the room that a temperature rise from a ten percent increase in carbon dioxide would be sufficient to melt the ice cap and submerge New York, adding that he believed chemical contamination of the atmosphere was more serious than most people realized.

  He also became entangled in some of the most improbable proposals in twentieth-century science policy. He championed Project Chariot, a plan accepted by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1958 to use a multi-megaton hydrogen bomb to excavate a deep-water harbor more than a mile long and half a mile wide near Point Hope, Alaska. The AEC withdrew the land from public domain while Teller publicly promoted the economic case. The Inupiat people living near the site were not officially informed of the plan until March 1960. Critics raised concerns about wildlife and radiation safety, and the harbor was projected to be ice-bound for nine months of the year. The project was abandoned in 1962.

  Teller proposed using nuclear bombs to trigger small hurricanes as a way of preventing large ones. He endorsed a related plan to extract oil from tar sands in northern Alberta using nuclear explosions, a project that received support from the Alberta government but was blocked by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.

• 6. Star Wars and Final Years

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  In the 1980s, Teller became the most prominent scientific advocate for what critics called "Star Wars": the Strategic Defense Initiative, a plan to use ground-based and satellite-based lasers, particle beams, and missiles to intercept incoming Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. He lobbied government agencies and gained the approval of President Ronald Reagan for a version involving elaborate satellites that would use atomic weapons to fire X-ray lasers at incoming missiles.

  The campaign produced one of science's driest running jokes. Teller and his associate Lowell Wood were accused of deliberately overselling the program and of encouraging the dismissal of laboratory director Roy Woodruff, who had tried to correct the error. Scientists began using the teller as a unit of unfounded optimism, noting that one teller was so large that most events had to be measured in nanotellers or picotellers. Hans Bethe, together with IBM physicist Richard Garwin and Cornell colleague Kurt Gottfried, published an analysis in Scientific American concluding that a suitable decoy system would disable the entire SDI network at a fraction of its cost.

  In 1987, Teller published Better a Shield than a Sword, laying out his views on civil defense. Following the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impacts on Jupiter in 1994, he proposed at a 1995 workshop at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that US and Russian weapons designers collaborate on a one-gigaton nuclear explosive device weighing roughly 25-30 tons, light enough for the Russian Energia rocket, that could vaporize a one-kilometer asteroid or divert larger extinction-class objects given enough lead time.

  He suffered a stroke two days before his death on the 9th of September 2003, in Stanford, California, at the age of 95. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2003, less than two months before he died. His final paper, published posthumously, advocated building a prototype liquid fluoride thorium reactor, with co-author Ralph Moir recounting its origins in 2007.