TELLER, Edward 1908-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born January 15, 1908, in Budapest, Hungary; died September 9, 2003, in Stanford, CA. Physicist, educator, and author. Teller was a key scientist at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and with the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb; he was considered by some to be the father of the hydrogen bomb. Initially obeying his father's wishes to focus on chemistry rather than continue with his love for mathematics, he studied at Karlsruhe Technical Institute and the University of Munich in the late 1920s. By the time he left Munich for the University of Leipzig, however, Teller had become fascinated by the new advances in atomic theory. He earned his Ph.D. at Leipzig in 1930, and the next year joined the University of Göttingen as a researcher. By this time, Teller, who was Jewish, was becoming increasingly nervous of the rise of the Nazis to power; he left Germany for Copenhagen on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to work at the Institute for Theoretical Physics; then he became a physics lecturer at the University of London in 1934. The next year, he was off to the United States, where he taught at George Washington University as a professor of physics from 1935 to 1941, the year he became a U.S. citizen. This was followed by a year at Columbia University before he became part of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago in 1942. The Manhattan Project's mission was to develop an atomic bomb, but soon Teller became more interested in an idea, initially proposed by Enrico Fermi, that an even more powerful bomb might be developed by creating a fusion reaction of deuterium nuclei. Teller began to work on this idea after the Manhattan Project was moved to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The team of physicists successfully completed the atomic bomb in 1945, which was then used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war in the Pacific. A few years later, the Soviet Union also devised an atomic bomb, and Teller became more convinced than ever that the United States had to build a hydrogen bomb as a deterrent to the Soviets' weapons. Gaining the support of the Atomic Energy Commission, but the opposition of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director at Los Alamos, Teller left Los Alamos in 1946 to teach at the University of Chicago. After getting backing from President Harry Truman on the hydrogen bomb project, he helped found what is now the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory near San Francisco. The first hydrogen bomb, which used a combination of the heavy elements deuterium and tritium, was successfully tested in 1952; as critics had predicted, the Soviets duplicated the test just three years later, and the nuclear arms race went into full swing. Meanwhile, while fears of the Soviet Union grew in the United States, the House Un-American Activities Committee was set up to hunt down possible Communist spies. One of the suspects was Teller's former supervisor, Oppenheimer; Teller's testimony, which strongly suggested Oppenheimer should be replaced while falling short of calling him a spy, cost him many of his friends and other scientific colleagues. Nevertheless, Teller managed to hold his career together and retain the respect of many other scientists, as well as the ear of the federal government. His teaching job at the University of California at Berkeley, where he had become a professor of physics in 1953, remained secure, and he would remain at UC Berkeley until his retirement as university professor emeritus in 1975. He also continued his work at Lawrence Livermore, where he had been director from 1958 to 1960 and was an associate director until his 1975 retirement. After 1975, Teller was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, and he began to champion a new idea: a missile defense system to protect the United States from nuclear attacks. This idea, which with the support of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars," fell into disfavor by 1993, when funding was cut under President Bill Clinton. However, in more recent years work has resumed under President George W. Bush's administration. Teller also once advocated another use for nuclear detonations that he called Project Plowshare; his concept was that atomic explosions could be used for mining and other peaceful projects, but it was an idea that would eventually fall to the wayside. In his later years, Teller would regret his role in the use of atomic bombs on Japan, and he also did not like being called the "father" of the hydrogen bomb; nevertheless, his contributions to atomic physics, recognized most recently when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003, have left an enduring legacy. Teller, who received numerous other awards during his lifetime, including the Thomas E. White and Enrico Fermi awards in 1962 and the Albert Einstein award in 1977, was the author of numerous books and articles. Among his publications are The Reluctant Revolutionary (1964), Power and Security (1976), Fusion: Magnetic Confinement (1981), and his 2001 autobiography, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics.