X-SciTech

Father Of H-Bomb Looks Back

December 26, 2001 / 11:58 AM EST / AP

He was among the pioneering greats of nuclear science. He was scorned for disavowing former boss Robert Oppenheimer. He didn't get a Nobel but did pick up the unlovely title of "father of the hydrogen bomb."

At 93, Edward Teller looks back at a lifetime of science that saw him often controversial but always influential.

"To put one point simply, I am blamed for having effectively worked on a horrible weapon," says Teller, who tells all - or at least all as he remembers it - in his recently published "Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics."

In his book and in an interview at his office at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Teller makes no apologies for his role as a cold warrior.

He believed then, as he believes now, that the terrible weapons he helped create kept the world from tumbling over the brink of global war.

He quotes an old Roman motto: "If you want peace, prepare for war." There will be peace, he says, "if the power is in the hands of those who want peace."

On the issue of Oppenheimer, Teller is more ambivalent. Oppenheimer was the brilliant physicist who served as top civilian on the Manhattan Project, which developed the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war, Oppenheimer was among those who opposed Teller's plans for a more powerful hydrogen bomb.

In 1954, at a hearing to review Oppenheimer's security status, Teller testified that he did not trust his rival. Oppenheimer was judged a security risk; Teller was judged a turncoat by many of his former friends.

Writing in his memoirs, Teller, an exile from anti-Semitism in Hungary and then Germany, described his ostracism as tantamount to a second exile.

Today, Teller remains critical of Oppenheimer's judgment. But Teller admits he was stupid to testify. And he says his doubts were based not on Oppenheimer's opposition to the hydrogen bomb but on Oppenheimer's treatment of a third man.

Teller notes that he never questioned Oppenheimer's loyalty to the United States, then or now, and appended a transcript of the testimony to his book to back that up.

The hearing, Teller says now, was "a big mistake," brought on by President Eisenhower's unwillingness simply to ignore Oppenheimer's opposition to the hydrogen bomb.

Afterward, Oppenheimer's friends "had to have a scapegoat and I had the ... most unwelcome role to stand in for Eisenhower," says Teller.

Reactions to Teller's book, written with Judith Shoolery, vary from raves about his painstakingly detailed chronicle of a long and fascinating career to scathing denunciations of his version of the Oppenheimer affair and other matters, such as his denial that mathematician Stanislaw Ulam played a critical role in the creation of the hydrogen bomb.

Asked whether he thinks something good came out of writing the book, Teller waves his arm at the stacks of copies sitting on his desk awaiting his signature, all purchased by employees of Lawrence Livermore, the lab he helped found in the 1950s.

At Livermore, he feels surrounded by "nothing but friends. Perhaps this is a little exaggeration but I believe it."

At home and at the lab, Teller relies on "a crew of kindly women" to maintain his still-active schedule. His much-loved wife of 66 years, Mici, died in 2000.

Approaching 94, he is hard of hearing and going blind. But his wits - and his wit - remain sharp.

Ask him a softball question flattering him for mentioning several women scientists who contributed to the field of nuclear physics and you get a half smile and the stumper: "Name them."

On the subject of the Nobel prize, he points out: "The situation that I get the Nobel Prize and people ask, 'Why the hell did you get it?' is less desirable than the situation where I do not get the Nobel prize and people ask, 'Why the hell did you not get it?"'

That sly sense of humor pops up frequently in "Memoirs."

There's physicist Enrico Fermi's first outing on horseback in the summer of 1937, reported to Teller by Mici. Fermi, who produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in 1942, got on and "told the horse in a firm voice: 'I am the boss.' It worked."

And there is the story of how fellow scientist Bob Serber prepared for the dangers of the first test of the atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. Teller writes that he asked Serber how he planned to deal with the rattlesnakes Oppenheimer had warned them about. Bring a bottle of whiskey was the reply. Then, Teller noted that some scientists feared the bomb could ignite the atmosphere. What would Serber do about that? Take a second bottle of whiskey.

Before the bombs were dropped on Japan, some scientists wanted to try demonstrating them first to try to scare the Japanese into surrender. Teller didn't sign their petition, but now says it might have been better if the bomb had been blown up in the sky over Tokyo, possibly ending the war without claiming so many lives.

Teller became a staunch supporter of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, known as "Star Wars," which aimed to create an impenetrable shield against missiles. The idea was criticized by some as impractical and shelved in the early 1990s.

This month President George W. Bush announced he was pulling out of the 1972 the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in hopes of building the world's first shield against nuclear missile attacks.

How does Teller feel about that?

Two words, he says, holding up two gnarled fingers: "High time!"

Teller's single-minded passion for defense through superior weaponry won him a title he thinks is in bad taste, "father of the hydrogen bomb."

Still, he understands where the nickname comes from. "I had a decisive influence and I used it and I felt I had to use it."

"So many times I have been asked whether I regret having worked on the atomic and hydrogen bombs," Teller writes in his Memoirs. "My answer is no. I deeply regret the deaths and njuries that resulted from the atomic bombings, but my best explanation of why I do not regret working on weapons is a question: What if we hadn't?"