Edward
Teller was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary,
in 1908. He graduated in chemical engineering at Karlsruhe, before
studying theoretical physics at Munich and Copenhagen under Nils
Bohr.
Teller continued his research in Germany
but when Adolf Hitler came to power in
1933 he decided to move to England. Two years later he emigrated to
America and taught at George Washington University before moving to
the University of Chicago.
In 1943 Teller joined Robert Oppenheimer,
Enrico Fermi, David
Bohm, James Franck, James
Chadwick, Otto Frisch, Emilio
Segre, Eugene Wigner, Felix
Bloch, Leo Szilard and Klaus
Fuchs on the Manhattan Project.
Over the next few years Teller developed the atom bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He also worked on developing the H-bomb (1946-53).
In 1953 Teller was appointed as professor at the University of California.
The following year Teller was a key witness against his colleague,
Robert Oppenheimer, who was considered
a security risk because he objected to the development of the hydrogen
bomb. Unlike Oppenheimer, Teller disagreed with the idea that a scientist
should consider the moral implications of research.
The author of Our Nuclear Future
(1958), Teller opposed the 1963 test-ban treaty. It was Teller who
convinced President Ronald Reagan of the
feasibility of the Star Wars Project for militarizing space with fission-bomb-powered
X-ray lasers.
(1)
Edward
Teller was
interviewed for a BBC television documentary, The Building of the
Bomb, in 1965.
If we had made
a demonstration and that had failed, then I think dropping the bomb
would have been justified in order to end the war. To drop it without
warning was wrong. It was wrong on moral grounds - it killed; it was
wrong, although I could not see that at the time, on practical grounds
because the dropping of the bomb has distorted our views, has changed
our whole outlook. We are not now looking on the accomplishment of
atomic explosions as progress which can, and should, be used in the
right way. We had started at that time to look at it as something
horrible, something that should not be continued.
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