Dr. Strangelove

When the last word is written about the Cold War, Edward Teller will be seen to have played a larger role in the race for nuclear weapons than any other American scientist. Increasingly, as archives in Russia and the United States have become accessible, it becomes clear that the United States, not the Soviet Union, set the pace. And if the United States drove the pace, it was Teller, more than any other scientist, who drove the United States. Teller did this first of all by his scientific contributions. But science is science, and Teller’s insights about thermonuclear reactions would in time have been discovered by someone else.

Teller’s greatest contribution to the H-bomb was, for better or worse, political. He was the only famous Manhattan Project scientist committed to--some say obsessed by--the desire to develop the fusion bomb. By relentlessly pressing his case in the corridors of power in Washington, he speeded its development in this country, and by so doing, he hastened its development in the USSR as well.

Born in Hungary in 1908, Teller received his scientific education in Germany. When the Nazis slammed the door to Jews, he left Europe for the United States, arriving in 1935 with the promise of a teaching job at George Washington University. It was the extraordinarily original Russian physicist George Gamow who invited him there, and the two men were in some ways alike. Gamow, as Teller describes him in this memoir, generated a new theory every day and easily tossed them away. Teller, too, came up with an idea every day but--to the consternation of colleagues at Los Alamos--he did not discard them so easily. In 1943, after stints at Columbia and the University of Chicago, Teller moved to New Mexico with his wife, Mici, and their infant son and joined the Manhattan Project. He helped the director, Robert Oppenheimer, recruit other scientists and did other special tasks for Oppenheimer. It was here, at Los Alamos, that the controversial part of Teller’s career began.

During his years in Europe, as a student in Munich, as assistant to the great Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig and as a young professor in Gottingen, Teller, on the evidence of this book, was a happy man. He did world-class scientific work, making a discovery, the Jahn-Teller effect, that could, and some say should, have won him the Nobel Prize. He won the hand of Mici Schutz, the girl he had loved since childhood, and so enjoyed the community of physicists of which he was part that he was blind, he says in this memoir, to the growing turmoil in Germany.

Friendships meant everything to him, and his friendships were to bring him a political education. One of his closest friends in Leipzig and Copenhagen was the brilliant Soviet physicist, Lev Landau. Landau was ardently pro-Communist, never failing to point to capitalist injustices. Teller was not anti-Communist at this time, despite four harsh months in 1919 when Communists had held power in Hungary. Now, in his 20s, out of admiration for Landau, he tended, he says, to accept his political views.

Years later, around the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, Laszlo Tisza, a friend from Budapest who had worked in the Soviet Union, gave Edward and Mici Teller an eyewitness account of the purges and executions that had swept Russia. Tisza told them of Landau’s arrest for alleged anti-Soviet activity and of the fact that after a terrible year in prison, Landau had emerged in broken health and with his faith in communism shattered.

Teller concluded that any regime that could treat its loyal believers with such cruelty must be a threat to civilization. Tisza’s stories and those of other veterans of the Soviet experience gave him insight into the lengths to which Stalin would go to coerce prodigious achievements from his people, an insight which never left him.

The largest part of this memoir is given over to his version of events that were to make him controversial in the larger scientific community and among the American public. Although what he says here is frequently belied by documents in the Library of Congress, FBI, Department of Energy and in the private papers of other players, the book is fascinating nonetheless for its insights into his mind and emotions. He was, and at the age of 93 remains, a man of dazzling contradictions. In the presence of people he feels are sympathetic to him, he can be generous, amusing and intensely loyal. But with those who are critical of him or have shown him up, the record shows him to have been unforgiving.

Teller’s account, which is engagingly written and not overly technical, raises old questions about his character. How could a man so intensely collegial, one to whom friendships meant so much, have been so difficult--even impossible--to work with? How could someone whose view of truth was absolute, all black and white, have shown such feeling for ambiguity, such understanding, for example, of the ambiguous situation in which the great German physicists, Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weiszcker, had found themselves in wartime Germany?

Teller revered Heisenberg, and in this book gives a magnanimous--and quite possibly accurate--analysis of the emotional barriers which may have prevented him from working on the atomic bomb for Hitler. Heisenberg, he says, excelled at everything, even Ping-Pong, and could have invented the bomb during the war if his unconscious had not kept him from thinking about it.

Teller shows similar sympathy for Heisenberg’s motives in 1941, when he made his much-discussed visit to Copenhagen to see Niels Bohr. He believes that Heisenberg was seeking moral advice from the man with whom he had made some of the greatest discoveries in 20th-century physics and that Bohr, a Jew living under Nazi occupation, was too frightened to listen. Teller’s generosity toward Heisenberg and Von Weiszcker continued after the war, when he went to see them in Germany and tried, without much success, to bring them back into the world scientific community. He was also generous to Landau, more generous than he tells us here, refraining from mentioning their friendship for decades out of concern for Landau’s plight in the Soviet Union.

Teller’s political career in the United States began in 1949, after President Truman’s announcement that the Soviets had tested an atomic bomb. The news hit Americans hard, with loss of our atomic monopoly giving rise to feelings of vulnerability. Teller immediately came under the wing of Ernest Lawrence, the great California inventor of the cyclotron who, like Teller, believed that the next big bomb, the hydrogen bomb, was feasible and necessary as the answer to the Soviets’ success. Lawrence showed Teller the ropes in Washington, saw that he had the necessary introductions and told him to lobby for H-bomb development. What followed was an intense secret debate in Washington over whether to launch a “crash program” to develop the hydrogen bomb. Nearly all the scientists who had worked on the A-bomb opposed such a program on grounds, as Robert Oppenheimer put it, that “there was nothing to crash into.” No one knew whether the new bomb was feasible; it would be too big to be used and it was, as physicists Enrico Fermi and I.I. Rabi put it, “necessarily an evil thing in any light.” The vast majority of scientists were opposed, but Teller’s side won.

Moreover, Teller had tasted the smoke of battle in Washington. Intensive theoretical work on the “Super,” as Teller’s H-bomb idea was called, had been suspended, with Teller’s assent, in 1947 until computers could be developed to handle the millions of mathematical calculations required. Research was then resumed on a “crash” basis. Teller worked full time at Los Alamos, and still no solution appeared. Teller clung obsessively, as he had for years, to his original 1946 model and insisted that it could be made to work.

After months of unavailing effort, a Polish mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam, decided that Teller’s Super had to be disproved before minds at Los Alamos would be free to devise a new approach. With a colleague, a slide rule and the primitive calculating machines then available, Ulam showed that Teller’s model was impractical. Teller was furious; he assailed Ulam’s motives, and angry shouting was heard in the corridors of Los Alamos. Teaming up with the unassailable Fermi, Ulam again proved that the Super was infeasible.

Adding insult to injury, Ulam then thought of the solution. It occurred to him that the way to make a hydrogen bomb was to place its components inside a single casing, with a fission bomb at one end and a package of thermonuclear material at the other, and use shock waves from the exploding fission bomb to compress the thermonuclear package and make it burn. Ulam was the first to understand that the compression required was not ordinary compression but fantastic compression beyond anything that had been thought of before.

Ulam took his ideas--the two stages within a single bomb and use of fantastic compression--to Teller, who at first resisted. After half an hour or so, Ulam wrote later, Teller saw Ulam’s logic and added an idea of his own: use of radiation, rather than shock, from the exploding fission bomb to compress the thermonuclear material. Their combined concept is called “radiation implosion.” (Discovered independently in other countries, it is the basis of every H-bomb ever built.)

Readers of Teller’s memoir will find neither this account of Ulam’s results nor the story of their joint breakthrough. (Teller did publish an article in 1955 in Science magazine in which he conceded that Ulam as well as others had contributed to the H-bomb.) He credits himself for the ideas of extreme compression and the use of radiation and fails to mention the third staging at all, despite the fact that a classified paper signed by the two of them reposes in a vault at Los Alamos, accessible to anyone with the proper clearance.

Teller concedes that he had “developed an allergy” to Ulam, and he has claimed in recent years that “Ulam invented nothing.” Clearly, he intends to make Ulam a non-person in the history books. But those who were present at the creation in Los Alamos remain contemptuous of Teller’s arrogating to himself sole credit for an invention that was the work of both men.

Further, they believed Teller’s obsession with his original Super--even today he believes that it could have worked--caused the lab to waste years “working on the wrong thing,” as one of them put it later, and delayed the American H-bomb. Teller concedes that “my single-minded focus ... was an extreme case of mental inertia.” Had he possessed his friend Gamow’s capacity to toss away his lesser ideas, the United States might have had the bomb sooner.

For years Teller had been criticizing Los Alamos to his contacts in Washington, complaining that its director was half-hearted about the H-bomb and its scientists not up to the task. This led to the so-called Second Lab affair, another crisis that roiled his relationships with colleagues. Soon after his and Ulam’s breakthrough in early 1951, Teller decided that Los Alamos was obstructing the effort and that a new facility was needed; that lab was soon established in Livermore, Calif. In October 1951, he left Los Alamos.

In this book he says that he left because it would have been “unseemly” to campaign for a new laboratory while still a member of the old. But the papers of Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray show that Teller won Murray’s support for a new lab on Feb. 9, 1951, eight months before he left Los Alamos, and other publicly available documents show that on the same day he began to raise the matter with officials at the commission, Congress and the Pentagon.

Teller’s criticism of colleagues behind their backs and his end-runs for a new laboratory won him no friends at Los Alamos and, after the first lab held a successful test of the Teller-Ulam principle in the Pacific in November 1952, only a year and a half after its invention, it was obvious that his charges had been unfounded. But by then the Livermore lab was up and running and Teller was settled in a place where his was the dominant spirit. His letters to friends no longer conveyed the feeling of a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But his greatest trial, and that of the community of U.S. physicists, lay ahead.

In late 1953, at the height of the McCarthy period, a letter was received by J. Edgar Hoover and other high officials charging that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy. President Dwight D. Eisenhower felt that he could not ignore the charges and ordered a security hearing. Teller regrets that the hearings were held, acknowledges the damage they did to the scientific community and blames Eisenhower for “lack of courage” in ordering them.

But it was Teller’s testimony that forever separated him from most of his generation of scientists. Teller said that Oppenheimer had given bad advice to the government when he opposed the H-bomb crash program and the creation of the Livermore Laboratory. He went on to say that he “would feel personally more secure” if Oppenheimer were no longer consulted by the government. In his memoir Teller writes that he testified under the shock of being shown a snippet of testimony in which Oppenheimer discussed the so-called Chevalier episode of early 1943, in which he told Army security that the Soviets had made three feelers to him. Later, after the war, he changed his story, naming Haakon Chevalier as the only man who had approached him. Teller says that his reaction upon reading Oppenheimer’s words was to wonder: If a man could treat a friend in such an untrustworthy way, how could he be trusted with the nation’s security?

Teller regrets his failure to make clear on the witness stand that it was Oppenheimer’s behavior toward Chevalier he found untrustworthy, not his advice about the H-bomb. He therefore makes much of having seen Oppenheimer’s testimony only moments before he entered the hearing room. He goes so far as to say that he trusts his memory over the evidence of a handwritten letter he wrote in 1961 in which he said that he had been prejudiced by reading Oppenheimer’s testimony the evening before. Moreover, 10 days earlier, in California, Teller had laid out his testimony to a government official. He had, in fact, informed against Oppenheimer to the FBI five years earlier, in July 1949, and twice in 1952, one of those occasions at his own instigation.

He had tried repeatedly behind the scenes to see that when Oppenheimer’s term on the Atomic Energy Commission’s advisory committee expired, he would not be reappointed. Teller believes that even without his testimony, the outcome would have been the same: Oppenheimer would still have lost his clearance. The more likely truth is that without Teller, there would have been no hearings. Moreover, his testimony was not spontaneous. Teller was manipulated into giving the testimony he did, and his role was part of a tightly orchestrated scenario designed to give Oppenheimer no way out. Even today, he appears to have no inkling of this. The hearings, which resulted in Oppenheimer’s losing his security clearance, ushered in the most painful period of Teller’s life.

In Budapest, until the age of 16, he had felt like an outcast, with no friends at school and banned from the boy scouts because he was Jewish. First he had had to leave Hungary, then Germany and then he became an outcast in the community of physicists he had so enjoyed--an old friend, Bob Christy, even refused to shake hands with him. He calls this his third, and harshest, exile. For years he was persona non grata at Los Alamos.

The memoir contains many omissions about Teller’s repeated efforts to torpedo test ban negotiations and about dubious weapon schemes at Livermore, such as “Palisades of Fire” (a plan to provide protection against incoming missiles that might have set the atmosphere on fire) or the ill-fated X-ray laser (part of the Strategic Defense Initiative). The omissions are so significant that one reads this book mainly for what it reveals of Teller’s character. This was a man so convinced of his rightness that his recollections of events are almost always at variance with those of other witnesses.

But about one thing he was right: the superb quality of Soviet physicists. Because of this insight, he constantly told Washington that the Russians were probably ahead of the United States in building the H-bomb. His scare tactics made the United States go faster, and we announced our intentions in public.

After our “Bravo” test in the Pacific in 1954, the Russians understood that we had made a breakthrough. A couple of months later they, too, had the secret. A year and a half later, they tested their radiation implosion device.

Glenn Seaborg took a different path than Teller. Grandson of a Swedish immigrant who worked as a machinist in the iron mines of Michigan and son of an ironworker there, he wrested an education in chemistry from UCLA and became the protege at UC Berkeley of G.N. Lewis, the greatest physical chemist of his day. In this posthumously published autobiography, excellently written with his son Eric, Seaborg says that in the heady atmosphere of Berkeley in the 1930s, he felt as if he had been plucked from the minors to play on a Major League all-star team.

Seaborg was not out of his league. While still in his early 30s, he codiscoverered plutonium in time for its use in the Nagasaki bomb and was part of the team that went on to discover eight elements. For the first achievement, he and physicist Ed McMillan won the 1951 Nobel Prize. He served a stint as chancellor of UC Berkeley, then was asked by President John F. Kennedy to be chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, a post he held for a decade.

While Teller thought that safety lay in unlimited nuclear testing, Seaborg believed that greater security lay in an end to nuclear testing. He calls it a “tragedy” that the United States failed to rise above the issue of inspection and negotiate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that eludes us to this day. Of the first two presidents he served, Seaborg observes that although Kennedy made it a top priority to achieve a test ban, excessive political caution caused him to fall short. For Lyndon B. Johnson, on the other hand, the test ban did not have such a high priority, but he was willing to take bigger risks. One senses Seaborg’s preference for LBJ’s more straightforward “Is it the right thing to do?”

As chairman of the AEC, one of Seaborg’s first projects was an effort to remedy the old injustice to Oppenheimer. First he asked the physicist if he would be willing to undergo the procedure necessary for restoration of his security clearance. “Not on your life,” Oppenheimer said. With others in the Kennedy administration, Seaborg then arranged for Oppenheimer to receive the 1963 Fermi Prize, the government’s highest award in the nuclear sciences.

While Seaborg and Teller held opposing views of negotiating with the Russians to limit nuclear weapons, on one question they saw eye to eye: the need for fewer government restrictions on scientific information for the public. A surprise at the close of Seaborg’s book is the story of his unsuccessful efforts over many years to have his diary, which he had kept since he was 14, declassified for the purpose of writing this book. Seaborg has been dead for nearly three years. His journal, in 26 heavily expurgated volumes, reposes in a classified section of the Library of Congress.