November 25, 2001
By RICHARD RHODES
They have almost all departed, the remarkable men and women
who discovered how to release nuclear energy and then
applied that knowledge to build the formidable weapons that
until Sept. 11 had kept us safe. Hans Bethe at Cornell and
Edward Teller at California's Hoover Institution endure
like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and such is their
intellectual vitality that they continue even in their 90's
to contribute to our continuing effort to understand the
consequences of their work.
Edward Teller has published other memoirs, but none has
been so comprehensive as this presumably final statement;
appropriately, borrowing the phrase from his old friend and
fellow Hungarian Leo Szilard, he calls it ''my version of
the facts.'' Sadly, if it sometimes enlarges and clarifies
the historical record, it more frequently denies or
distorts it.
Teller, born in 1908, remembers that he was an anxious
child, with ''an almost chronic bad conscience'' and a
''fear of the dark.'' He distracted himself from his fears
with compulsive calculation; ''finding the consistency of
numbers is the first memory I have of feeling secure.'' It
was security he would need in the difficult years of his
childhood, when Hungary saw war, economic collapse, a
Communist takeover and then, under Miklos Horthy, the first
fascist regime in Europe.
Mathematics led to science, and by adolescence Teller had
befriended three fellow Jews whose lives in science and
politics would intersect with his for decades: Szilard, the
theoretical physicist who first conceived the idea of a
nuclear chain reaction; Eugene Wigner, also a theoretical
physicist and a leader with Szilard in their 1939 project
to warn Franklin Roosevelt through Albert Einstein about
the dangers of a German atomic bomb; and John von Neumann,
the gifted mathematician who became central to the
development of the digital computer. All these men would
contribute significantly to the Manhattan Project, Nazi
anti-Semitism having driven them to emigrate from Germany
to America.
Teller was thus on hand at the Carnegie Institution of
Washington in January 1939 for one of the first
demonstrations of nuclear fission, recently discovered in
Berlin. He drove Szilard to visit Einstein at his summer
residence on Long Island to compose the famous letter to
Roosevelt. In 1942 he helped Robert Oppenheimer organize
Los Alamos, where the first bombs would be designed and
built. Before then, in the autumn of 1941, he recalls that
Enrico Fermi had asked him ''whether I thought that an
atomic explosion might be used to produce a thermonuclear
reaction.'' Teller, having concluded at first that a
hydrogen bomb was impossible because the energy of the
atomic explosion would rapidly disperse as X-rays, changed
his mind the following summer, suspecting that the energy
could be applied before it radiated away. In the event,
X-radiation would prove crucial to making thermonuclear
weapons work. From 1941 forward, Teller pursued a hydrogen
bomb with his name on it.
At this point in the story, Teller's version of the facts
begins to diverge from the versions of other participants.
He says he remembers Oppenheimer discussing atomic bombs
over dinner in Berkeley in 1942, when the secret project
was well under way, with Haakon Chevalier, a professor of
French who was later notoriously an intermediary in a
Soviet espionage attempt. ''I was not at all surprised or
alarmed by the dinnertime exchange,'' Teller adds
ingenuously, since it only consisted of ''layman's
generalities.'' He claims that Oppenheimer spoke
contemptuously of Brig. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the
Manhattan Project commander, behind his back, and warned
that after the war the scientific community would ''have to
do things differently and resist the military.'' The latter
argument Teller says he rejected. ''Oppie changed the
subject immediately. I believe that the relationship
between us changed at that instant . . . . The warmth of
our conversation vanished and never returned.'' Unlike the
memory of the rest of us, Teller's seems to improve with
age; he did not recall these ''facts'' when their subjects
were alive to rebut them.
Similarly, he claims that Niels Bohr -- who warned
Churchill and Roosevelt that the atomic bomb would become a
common danger and argued that they should begin
negotiations for international control with Stalin before
the bomb was used -- had proposed ''sharing all of our
knowledge with the Soviets,'' which is untrue. What Bohr
proposed (international cooperation in developing nuclear
science and nuclear energy in lieu of building bombs) was
embodied in the Acheson-Lilienthal Plan that Oppenheimer
and four other experts drafted in 1946; Teller says he
considered the idea ''the most attractive feature of the
proposal.''
He acknowledges that the calculations he used to support
his claim in 1946 in an official government report that his
design for ''the Super,'' a hydrogen bomb, would work were
''flawed,'' but says his failure to check them was because
of ''the decision not to proceed with work'' on the weapon.
In fact, as he reveals, the American military was happy
with atomic bombs in the late 1940's and uninterested in
anything larger, nor did Teller himself volunteer to
participate in the summer of 1949 when the Los Alamos
Laboratory leadership proposed resuming work on
thermonuclear weapons.
The first Russian test of an atomic bomb in August 1949
reactivated Teller's old insecurities; he wrote to his
physicist friend Maria Mayer that he felt ''quite doubtful
whether we can keep up with the Russians in the atomic
race.'' With the encouragement of conservative colleagues,
he began promoting thermonuclear development as the right
answer to Joe 1, and he implies in this memoir that he
believes his contribution was ''crucial'' to President
Harry Truman's decision in January 1950 to accelerate work
on a hydrogen bomb. Truman's decision was not technical,
however, but military; the Joint Chiefs had told him
forcefully ''that the United States would be in an
intolerable position if a possible enemy possessed the bomb
and the United States did not,'' and that was good enough
for him. A technical decision would have had to take into
account the embarrassing fact that America did not know how
to build the massive new weapon it was announcing to the
world it would pursue.
Teller's version of the breakthrough to a two-stage
thermonuclear weapon unsurprisingly denies any significant
contribution from the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam,
who was co-author with Teller of the fundamental paper.
Instead, Teller attributes the breakthrough to his
infuriation with needling from Carson Mark, the head of the
Los Alamos laboratory's theoretical division; it was Mark's
insistence, he says, that led him to review his previous
ideas. He claims to have found his mistake in December
1950: he had failed to realize that compressing the
thermonuclear fuel was necessary for fusion reactions to
proceed.
The holidays passed; he observed atomic tests in Nevada; he
discussed compression with von Neumann; and only then, he
says, did Ulam approach him in January 1951 with his
independently derived ideas (''far from original,'' Teller
scoffs) of staging and compression. Truman had ordered a
''crash program'' to develop a hydrogen bomb; the Chinese
had recently entered the Korean War; Teller had found the
secret that had eluded him for 10 years; but he wishes us
to believe that he kept silent for more than a month
because Norris Bradbury, the director of the Los Alamos
lab, had embargoed further discussion until after a test
series scheduled for late April 1951. Well, Ulam had gone
to Bradbury before he saw Teller. ''He quickly grasped the
possibilities,'' Ulam remembered, ''and at once showed
great interest in pursuing it.'' Teller's claim that he had
already made the breakthrough simply isn't credible, nor
did Carson Mark confirm it when he was alive.
More tortuous is Teller's explanation of his involvement in
the 1954 hearing that removed Oppenheimer's security
clearance. In order to sustain his version of the facts, he
denies having made statements that appear in F.B.I.
documents, legal depositions and even a letter in his own
hand. He acknowledges that his testimony was damaging to
Oppenheimer (in fact it destroyed him), but even all these
years later he has no sympathy to spare; he complains
instead of ''the exile I was to undergo at the hands of my
fellow physicists, akin to the shunning practiced by some
religious groups. . . . I was more miserable than I had
ever been before in my entire life.''
Curiously, Teller never seems to have understood the
systematics of nuclear arms control. ''We both preferred
safeguards to simple trust when it came to international
agreements,'' he says of Fermi, as if international
treaties are negotiated without provision for inspection
and enforcement. He opposed a nuclear test ban, he writes,
because ''the Soviets were at all times ahead of us in
terms of the great numbers of weapons they had amassed,''
as if it mattered how many times either side could make the
rubble bounce. Distrusting arms control, he began promoting
missile defense in 1946, and was a major player behind the
scenes in Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. It
remains to be determined how much responsibility the
missile defense mandarins bear for the nation's lack of
protection against terrorist attacks, how much their
glamorous and expensive high-tech visions distracted our
leaders from practical home defenses.
''The cold war was unique,'' Teller concludes modestly.
''It was won by the existence, not the use, of a new
weapon, and without the loss of life.'' If Teller means the
hydrogen bomb won the cold war, he's mistaken. Deterrence
bought us time, but people desiring freedom and opportunity
(in Poland and Eastern Europe and then in the Soviet Union
itself) tore down the walls.
Personally charming, unquestionably brilliant, loving and
generous to family and friends, Edward Teller approaches
the end of a long career as a divisive force in American
science and politics, someone who lent his scientific
reputation to dangerous belligerencies that cost the nation
lives and treasure but left it shockingly unprepared. About
these realities his ''Memoirs'' are silent. ''The private
Hans Bethe is a different sort of man from the public
one,'' he says accusingly about his old colleague, adding,
''Perhaps the same can be said of me.'' Indeed it can.
Richard Rhodes is the author of ''The Making of the Atomic
Bomb'' and ''Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.''
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company