Life Stories

Edward Teller was reputed to have recklessly advocated the development of devastating weapons. He was accused of trying to arm the US to the teeth, regardless of the risks to peace and the survival of the human race. And he was said to have ruined a brilliant colleague, Dr Robert Oppenheimer. Teller was a major architect of the US nuclear arsenal and an unrelenting champion of US military dominance. Anyone in this position was sure to provoke political and moral outrage – and he did.

The father of the hydrogen bomb was born into a Hungarian-Jewish family in Budapest. He took a PhD in theroretical physics in 1930 at Leipzig in Germany under Werner Heisenberg, who later became director of Nazi Germany's atom bomb research project. Teller left Germany when the Nazis came to power and travelled first to Britain and then to the United States, where he became a US citizen.

Teller belonged to a generation of physicists who had broken with the idea that the Universe consisted of lumps of indestructible matter. He and his peers were exploring new concepts of the world in which matter could be transformed into energy. This was the realm of sub-atomic physics. And in early 1939, the discovery that uranium atoms can fission, or split, was announced. On the eve of the Second World War, the practical possibilities of this research became apparent. A self-perpetuating chain reaction of nuclear fission in uranium might produce a new kind of bomb – an atom bomb.

Teller and his fellow scientists would soon use the smallest known entities on Earth to create the biggest ever explosions.

In 1942, the Manhattan Project was approved by the US. This was intended to bring selected scientists together with the explicit aim of making atomic weapons. It was here that Teller and his colleagues applied their understanding of physics to develop the atom bomb.

They discovered that not all forms of uranium can fission. Natural uranium is composed of two forms – uranium²³⁵ and uranium²³⁸. Only the 235 form can fission – this is a problem as 235 represents only about 1% of natural uranium content. The other 99% is the non-fissable 238 form. If the amount of uranium²³⁵ present is too small then a chain reaction can't be sustained. But by late 1944 the Manhattan team had learnt how to enrich uranium with uranium²³⁵.

The chain reaction had so far only been initiated in uranium by bombarding it with additional sub-atomic particles. The next problem was how to do this in the small space inside a bomb. Here Teller made a vital contribution. He suggested that two small pieces of highly enriched uranium²³⁵, neither capable of sustaining a chain reaction on its own, could be blasted together inside the bomb. The two uranium pieces would be capable of supporting a chain reaction. An atomic explosion would result.

This was the technology of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in Japan on 6 August 1945. The size of the explosion was equivalent to that of 12-15 thousand tonnes of TNT.

But even before the first atom bombs were built, Teller was becoming fascinated with the possibility of an even more powerful weapon. He dreamt of a bomb that was modeled on the same chemical inferno that fuels the Sun. This bomb was to become known as the hydrogen bomb (also known as the H-bomb or Super Bomb). If a bomb could be created from splitting the atom, Teller reasoned, the process of fusion should create an even more powerful explosion. Although both rely on an atomic chain reaction, the process of fusion releases a much greater amount of energy than fission.

Research on a hydrogen bomb was virtually halted after the Japanese bombs were dropped. Dissatisfied, Teller left the official research project in 1945, and played a key role in setting up a rival weapons research lab, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. In August 1949, the Soviet Union tested a crude type of hydrogen bomb. Consequently, in January 1950, President Truman re-approved the development and testing of hydrogen bombs, with Teller leading research.

In 1950, the project ran into technological difficulties. The team needed to find a way of generating the vast amount of energy required to start a fusion reaction. Teller himself turned the situation around by means of a brilliant theoretical breakthrough, achieved with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam. They harnessed the energy created by fission reactions to ignite a separate mass of fusion fuel. This had to be done before the fission reactions blew the bomb apart. Teller and Ulam designed a process in which energy from fission would be transferred by radiation to the fusion fuel. This Teller-Ulam idea was used in the first US hydrogen bomb, successfully tested in 1952, and in all subsequent US hydrogen bombs.

The hydrogen bomb is potentially a thousand times more powerful than the original atom bomb. These were the bombs that opened the horrific possibility of global destruction in a nuclear war. The hydrogen bomb, more than anything else, was the fuel that fired the Cold War.

Dr Robert Oppenheimer had been a Scientific Director on the Manhattan Project. During his time on the Project, he became opposed to the use of nuclear weapons on moral grounds. On witnessing the first test-bomb he remarked: 'I have become death, the shatterer of worlds'.

Oppenheimer remained opposed to the use of the atom bomb and he refused to participate in the effort to produce the hydrogen bomb. Teller had little sympathy with the sentiments of his then boss. With espionage in mind, the US Atomic Energy Commission put Oppenheimer under the spotlight, suspecting him of having communist sympathies. Teller testified in the hearings that followed. When asked if he thought Oppenheimer posed a security risk, Teller's answer was direct:

'I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more'.

Oppenheimer's career was ruined. It was not until 1963, four years before his death, that he was officially absolved by the US Atomic Energy Commission. It recognized his contribution to science and technology by awarding him the Enrico Fermi Medal.

As anti-military, anti-nuclear and pro-environmental sentiments spread in the West through the 1960s, Teller became demonized by some commentators. Undeterred, he strongly advocated the Star Wars programme of space-based, anti-ballistic missile defences.

Teller has never had any doubts about his leading part in the hydrogen bomb effort. It's clear to him that it would have been the death of freedom if Stalin had got the bomb first. He states:

'Here is the enormous difference between the first and second half of this century. The first half saw two world wars: in the First World War, more than 10 million people got killed; in the Second World War, perhaps as many as 50 million. Conflicts on a comparably big scale in the second half did not occur. On the general historical record, the second half of the 20th century will go down as a peaceful period. And it was peaceful because the power was in the hands of those who wanted peace.'

Edward Teller died on 9 September 2003 aged 95. Until his death he continued to work, part-time, for the academic and political Hoover Institute at Stanford University in the US. In true controversial style, his death was celebrated by as many people as mourned him.