Bomb creator remains unapologetic
http://augustachronicle.com/stories/110600/tec_066-4846.000.shtml
November 6, 2000

By Brandon Haddock
Staff Writer
 
Just as the hydrogen bomb incited controversy, so did the man who created it.

Edward Teller's dogged pursuit of the ``superbomb'' earned the Hungarian-born physicist the ridicule of his peers, and has colored historical views of the scientist.

But Dr. Teller, who at age 92 remains a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution and director emeritus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, refuses to apologize for his role in creating the world's first thermonuclear weapon, a development that gave the United States an early lead in the Cold War arms race and changed the face of warfare forever.

``I have no regrets about my work on the atomic bomb,'' he wrote on an Internet forum recently. ``Actually, American strength in atomic and hydrogen bombs served to limit the expansion of Soviet power and gave time to the Russian people in which to change their government.

``A solution to our present problems might indeed be the situation of effective weapons in the hands of those who don't want to use them. This may be oversimplified, but it seems to have worked so far.''

Like so many of his colleagues, Dr. Teller came to the United States as a refugee from anti-Semitism and fascism in Europe. The Jewish scientist twice was forced to seek refuge, first from the Horthy regime in his native Hungary, then from Nazi Germany, before coming to the United States in 1935.

Dr. Teller was one of the first scientists recruited to work on the ``Manhattan Project,'' the United States' super-secret effort to build an atomic bomb. He joined Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi's effort to construct the world's first nuclear reactor at University of Chicago, where Fermi first mentioned to Dr. Teller the possibility of a hydrogen-fueled ``superbomb.''

Intrigued by the concept, Dr. Teller began devoting more and more time to it, to the chagrin of his peers who were enveloped in the development of the first atomic weapons.

After the war, Dr. Teller pushed for the United States to develop the hydrogen bomb, but contemporaries, awestruck by the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, refused to work on such a weapon and opposed his efforts. Dr. Teller won the debate in 1949, after the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb.

With the help of mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, Dr. Teller designed a working hydrogen bomb - only to see control of the project to build and test it removed from his hands. By 1952, when the first hydrogen bomb exploded over Eniwetok atoll in the south Pacific, Dr. Teller was in California working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a second weapons lab he helped found.

Nonetheless, Dr. Teller is known as ``the father of the hydrogen bomb,'' and as such, history has never determined quite what to make of the man.