Rewriting the History of THE BRAINS BEHIND THE H-BOMB : EDWARD TELLER Giant of the Golden Age of Physics <i> by Stanley A. Blumberg and Louis G. Panos (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $24.95; 306 pp., illustrated; 0-684-19042-7)</i>

Few figures in the nuclear era have had a more remarkable impact, be it for good or ill, or been more controversial, and thus worthy of honest appraisal, than Edward Teller. The principal advocate of the development of the H-bomb, a primary opponent of virtually all arms-control agreements and the godfather of “Star Wars,” Teller has shaped this era as have few others. His pivotal role in the destruction of J. Robert Oppenheimer (called in this volume a “dark duty”) created a schism in American science that has yet to heal. Nuclear weapons-testing likely would have been banned as of the early ‘60s rather than just forced underground had it not been for his strenuous opposition to a comprehensive test ban.

Teller’s defense of all things nuclear led popular culture to cast him as the prototypal Dr. Strangelove, the mad scientist fixated on bigger and better means of mass destruction. Many in the American defense establishment, however, and especially on its far right wing, have honored him as a patron saint. Undeniably controversial, undeniably important, he is eminently worthy of a serious work of biography. Unfortunately, Stanley Blumberg and Louis Panos have not written that work.

Suspicions aroused by their subtitle, “Giant of the Golden Age of Physics,” are only confirmed by the book itself, which appears at times to be a mere rewrite of Blumberg’s earlier, fawning biography of Teller (co-written with Teller’s friend Gwinn Owens), “Energy and Conflict: The Life and Times of Edward Teller.” The passage of time has not improved that seriously flawed work, and the current authors have not corrected its errors but rather enlarged them considerably.

For example, one of the primary claims of the 1976 biography is that the Soviets “beat” the United States to the hydrogen bomb, having allegedly detonated one before the Americans did. This bald assertion--which has been repeated by others so many times now that it has a life of its own--was thoroughly disproved by Herbert York in his scrupulously careful work, “The Advisers: Oppenheimer, Teller and the Superbomb.”

York, the first director of Teller’s Livermore National Laboratory, made a thorough study of the 1953 Soviet test referred to by Blumberg and Owens and demonstrated conclusively that it was not a true H-bomb. The first H-bomb test using the Teller-Ulam breakthrough that made it all possible was by the United States in late 1952; the first deliverable H-bomb was tested by the United States in 1954, and the first Soviet test of a genuine H-bomb was in 1955. (Recent work suggests, in fact, that it was the debris from the U.S. H-bomb test of 1952 that “telegraphed” the Teller-Ulam design secret to the Soviets, substantially assisting their 1955 success.) That the 1953 Soviet test was not a true H-bomb was confirmed in a 1982 article in Los Alamos Science by Hans Bethe, who chaired the U.S. committee analyzing the debris from that Soviet test.

Do Blumberg and Panos in the new biography correct the earlier mistaken assertion in light of the subsequent disclosures by York and Bethe? No. In fact, they compound it, making new claims about even earlier Soviet tests. Are they unaware of the York and Bethe works? No, both are included as references; and, most dishonestly of all, the York book is even cited in support of their claim! An honest mistake is one thing, deliberate distortion of this sort is another.

Where the authors do not repeat mistakes from the earlier work they make new ones. One of the most outrageous occurs in a discussion of the so-called Teller-Ulam design. Here the authors support Teller’s denials of any contribution by Stanislaw Ulam to the invention of the H-bomb. “Ulam triggered nothing,” they quote Teller as saying, justifying his refusal to sign patent papers drawn up for the two of them by Los Alamos.

A few lines later, however, the authors provide the only newsworthy material in the entire book--Teller’s first detailed statement of Ulam’s crucial contribution. Shortly after suffering a heart attack in 1979, Teller dictated a long statement about the origins of the H-bomb to his associate, George A. Keyworth, whom he subsequently recommended for the post of science adviser to President Reagan. In that statement, Teller confirms what has only recently been disclosed by others, including this author: that Ulam figured out how to get around the heat-loss problems that had plagued the original Teller design by proposing the use of an A-bomb to compress a second thermonuclear stage. Teller’s contribution to this breakthrough was to propose a variant on the Ulam scheme, using energy from the fission trigger in the form of radiation rather than mechanical shock.

Teller’s original scheme for a “Super” bomb throughout the ‘40s was to use heat from an atomic bomb to ignite uncompressed liquid deuterium, a cheap and plentiful isotope of hydrogen. In 1950, Ulam and several associates demonstrated that ignition would fizzle unless huge amounts of prohibitively expensive tritium (another isotope of hydrogen, very much more difficult to obtain) were added.

Through the rest of 1950 and into early 1951, Teller reportedly was desperate, trying unsuccessfully to find a way to make the “Super” bomb ignite and propagate. In the statement to Keyworth, Teller now confirms how an answer was found. The man who found the errors in Teller’s original design walked into his office with a way around the problem. In Teller’s own words:

“Sometime in February, Ulam came into my office and said, ‘I have a way to make the Super. Let us compress the material.’

“I said, ‘Yes.’

“And then he said, ‘Well, you know, we could, for instance, have here a nuclear explosion and then put it around some containers to make a starlike structure and put deuterium in here and they will be compressed by the shock and then it will work.’

”. . . I said, ‘Stan, (that is) the simplest thing and it might work, but I think I know something better. You should not compress mechanically. You should compress by radiation. ‘ “

Teller went on, the authors say:

“He wouldn’t take it, so I said, ‘All right.’

“Stan could talk an awful lot and consume a lot of time, and by that time we did not get along very well. I said, ‘Look, I will put down both of these ideas into a paper and we’ll both sign it’. “

Here, for the first time we seem to have Teller confirming in detail Ulam’s own less-specific version of the creation of the H-bomb, as well as the events hinted at in the thorough official AEC history of the period by Hewlett and Duncan. However, in an absolutely remarkable reversal just a few sentences later, Teller denies that Ulam should receive any credit for the invention, claiming that after the “George” test a few months later, Ulam raised doubts that their invention would work.

Of the question of priority, Teller is quoted as saying:

“In general, I am not interested; and if in the collaboration of Ulam and myself there would have been nothing more than what I have told so far, then I would have proceeded and happily acknowledged that this invention is due to Ulam and me. But when the George (test) shot had been fired, Ulam went around and talked to everybody in Los Alamos who would listen that the George shot has proved that the hydrogen bomb could never work. . . . To me, authorship in a paper does not mean a question of priority; it means a question of responsibility. If you have signed the paper, you should stand up for it. Or if you don’t stand up for it, you should tell why you have changed your mind. And to my knowledge Ulam never did.”

Leaving aside Teller’s extraordinary assertion that subsequent doubts about a discovery should remove one from attribution for it, the very claim that Ulam repeatedly declared after the George test that it had proven the H-bomb impossible appears completely false. Hans Bethe and J. Carson Mark, Bethe’s successor as Theoretical Division head at Los Alamos, whom I have queried about the claim, both say it is nonsense. Bethe says, in fact, that if anyone had doubts, it was Teller, who sent several memoranda expressing concern that the planned “Mike” test of the new H-bomb design wouldn’t work.

Francoise Ulam, Stanislaw Ulam’s widow, whom I also queried, may have the explanation, however. Her husband, she says, used to joke about Teller’s tendency to over-enthusiasm. Indeed, in a letter to Princeton mathematician John von Neumann, Ulam sketched out his new concepts for a workable thermonuclear weapon, indicating he had taken them to Teller: “Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities; this is perhaps an indication they will not work.”

Can Edward Teller be so humorless that he cannot share credit with Ulam because of a joke? And is the invention of so horrible a weapon something about which one should want credit in the first place?

Despite the publisher’s claim of “startling revelations,” there is little new in this book. And despite the claim of “exhaustive research,” the book is so filled with wrong dates for important events and misrepresentations of facts and sources that little in it can be relied upon as true. Adm. Noel Gayler, for example, becomes Adm. Lowell Gaylor; the Trident submarine becomes the Triad submarine; and so on. Without any source provided, J. Robert Oppenheimer is said to have been a diagnosed schizophrenic. Leo Szilard is said to have “touted Communism as a wholly positive force.”

Campaign biographies, celebrity puff pieces and the like, if they do little good, rarely do much harm, for they are easily recognized for what they are. Because of the technical subject matter, this book may be less easily recognized; and to the extent that its errors and misrepresentations gain currency, a genuine disservice will have been done to the truth about the crucial events in which Edward Teller played a part.