Nuclear Fusion IV: Teller's Dream

You can get too caught up in praising the beauty of science and
conflating that with praising the individual. I think we should
recognise and appreciate brilliance, but stop short of
hero-worship. It’s reductive. It diminishes people. It removes
important parts of who they were. It can, in its worst excesses,
be downright dangerous.

Nevertheless, that’s not a problem I have today, even though I’m
going to tell this story partly biographically. Because Edward
Teller, for all his brilliance in physics, is not the kind of
person you’d want to worship as a hero. Yet it’s Teller, for good
or ill, rightly or wrongly, who is most associated with the first
successful large-scale harnessing of the power of fusion by human
beings: the hydrogen bomb.

If you’ve ever seen the film Dr Strangelove, or “How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb”, you’ll know something of the
popular perception of Teller. If you haven’t, you should
immediately find a copy and watch it. From the moment that Teller
was brought onto the Manhattan project, he was pushing for it to
expand – not just to create a bomb that would harness the power
of nuclear fission, but a fusion bomb. A hydrogen bomb, that
would – according to theoretical calculations – be thousands of
times more powerful. It would begin a long career in physics and
the military that would see Teller consistently and endlessly
advocate for more and more powerful weapons – total nuclear
supremacy over the Soviet Union. It was an obsessive quest that
led some of his oldest friends and colleagues to turn on him, in
the end. The physicist Isidore Rabi later said: “He is a
danger to all that is important. I do really feel
it would have been a better world without Teller.”


 


 



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