Edward Teller
Hungarian-American physicist, advocate of the hydrogen bomb
Also known as: Teller
Edward Teller (1908–2003) was a Hungarian-American physicist, Manhattan Project veteran, and the leading scientific advocate of the hydrogen-bomb programme. Quigley uses him as the foil figure to J. Robert Oppenheimer in the post-war nuclear-policy narrative of Tragedy and Hope.
From émigré physicist to H-bomb champion
Quigley places Teller among the Hungarian-refugee scientists who, with Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and John von Neumann, "tried to establish a voluntary censorship of research information and to arouse the American government to the significance of the possible atom bomb" in early 1939 (T&H 866). His role in the thermonuclear programme begins with the late-1930s collaboration at George Washington University: "In 1935 Gamow invited the Hungarian refugee scientist Edward Teller to join him at George Washington. They worked together and talked a good deal about the problem of hydrogen fusion. After listening to them, another refugee, Hans Bethe… worked out the now accepted equations" (T&H 973). The intellectual lineage from Hungarian-émigré physics through the wartime programme to the H-bomb advocacy of the 1950s runs continuously through Teller.
The hydrogen-bomb politics
Quigley's narrative of the H-bomb decision treats Teller's faction as the institutional driver of the 1953–1954 turn against the Oppenheimer line. After the bomb was "made, sympathizers and allies of both the air force and of Teller conveniently forgot the former's earlier opposition to nuclear weapons development and began to question the loyalty of others who had opposed development of the H-bomb, including those 'official scientists' who had done so because they realized it would jeopardize the development" of conventional military capability (T&H 974). The episode anchors Quigley's broader claim that the post-war national-security state had a self-protecting bureaucratic momentum that operated independently of strategic merit.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 866 Quigley
Hungarian refugees, led by Leo Szilard and including Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and John von Neumann, tried to establish a voluntary censorship of research information and to arouse the American government to the significance of the possible atom bomb.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 973 Quigley
In 1935 Gamow invited the Hungarian refugee scientist Edward Teller to join him at George Washington. They worked together and talked a good deal about the problem of hydrogen fusion.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 974 Quigley
Sympathizers and allies of both the air force and of Teller conveniently forgot the former's earlier opposition to nuclear weapons development and began to question the loyalty of others who had opposed development of the H-bomb.