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["Szegedi Péter" <pszegedi AT elte.hu>]

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Date forwarded:         Wed, 10 Sep 2003 08:23:36 +0200
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From:                   mata kimasitayo 
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Subject:                (Associated Press | 10 septem. 2003) Edward Teller, 
'Father of
                H-Bomb,' Dies By RON HARRIS
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http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Obit-Teller.html

Edward Teller, 'Father of H-Bomb,' Dies 

By RON HARRIS 
Associated Press Writer 
Filed at 1:01 a.m. ET
September 10, 2003

SAN FRANCISCO - Edward Teller, who played a key 
role in U.S. defense and energy policies for more than 
half a century and was dubbed the "father of the H-bomb" 
for his enthusiastic pursuit of the powerful weapon, died 
Tuesday. He was 95. 

Teller suffered a stroke and died at his home on the Stanford 
University campus, not far from the Hoover Institute where he 
served as a senior research fellow, Susan Houghton, a spokes-
woman for the laboratory said. 

Teller exerted a profound influence on America's defense and 
energy policies, championing the development of the atomic and 
hydrogen bombs, nuclear power and the Strategic Defense 
Initiative. 

Among honors he received were the Albert Einstein Award, the 
Enrico Fermi Award and the National Medal of Science and, in 
July, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Yet Teller also will be remembered for his role in destroying 
the career of his one-time boss, Robert Oppenheimer - which 
alienated Teller from many of his colleagues - and for pushing 
the H-bomb and the Strategic Defense Initiative on grounds that, in
the opinion of critics, were sketchy or dubious. 

Teller's staunch support for defense stemmed in part from two 
events that shaped his dark, distrustful view of world affairs - the
1919 communist revolution in his native Hungary and the rise of 
Nazism
while he lived in Germany in the early 1930s. 

Even the end of the Cold War did not change Teller's view that 
the United States needed a strong defense. 

"The danger for ballistic missiles in the hands of 18 different 
nations has increased, and will increase, unless we have a defense,"
he said. "If we want to have stable, peaceful conditions, defense
against sudden attack by rockets is more needed than ever." 

Witty and personable, with a passion for playing the piano, 
Teller nevertheless was a persuasive Cold Warrior who 
influenced presidents of both parties. 

In 1939, he was one of three scientists who encouraged Einstein 
to alert President Franklin Roosevelt that the power of nuclear 
fission - the splitting of an atom's nucleus - could be tapped 
to create a devastating new weapon. 

Two years later, even before the first atom bomb was completed, 
fellow scientist Enrico Fermi suggested that nuclear fusion - 
fusing rather than splitting nuclei - might be used for an even 
more destructive explosive, the hydrogen bomb. 

Teller's enthusiasm and pursuit of such a bomb - he called 
it the "Super" - won him the title "father of the H-bomb," 
a characterization he said he hated. The first megaton 
H-bomb was exploded in 1952. 

The H-bomb was never used in war, but atom bombs were 
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, 
quickly leading to Japan's surrender. They followed by less 
than one month the first major atomic explosion on July 16, 
1945, at Trinity Site in New Mexico. 

In 1995, Teller looked back a half-century and wondered 
if the United States could have showed Japan the tremendous 
power of the bombs without destroying the cities. Some 
scientists had suggested at the time that a bomb be exploded 
in the sky miles over Tokyo harbor in hopes of scaring Japan 
into surrendering with a minimum of casualties. 

"I think we shared the opportunity and the duty, which we 
did not pursue, to find ... a possibility to demonstrate" the 
bomb, Teller said at a 50th-anniversary forum. "Now in 
retrospect I have a regret." 

Still, he defended the existence of atomic weapons, saying, 
"The second half of the century has been incomparably more 
peaceful than the first, simply by putting power into the 
hands of those people who wanted peace." 

Teller continued to lecture and conduct research into his 
90s, although ill health had slowed him some by then. 

Edward Teller was born Jan. 15, 1908, in Budapest. He 
received his university education in Germany, earning a 
Ph.D. in physics at the University of Leipzig. 

In 1935, Teller and his wife, Mici, came to the United 
States, where Teller was a professor at George Washington 
University until 1941, the same year the Tellers became 
U.S. citizens. 

Teller joined the Manhattan Project in 1942 at Los Alamos 
(N.M.) Scientific Laboratory to work on developing the first 
atomic bomb. He also promoted the hydrogen fusion bomb, a 
concept that attracted interest but remained secondary to 
the work on the atomic weapon. 

After the success of the Manhattan Project, Teller left in 
1946 to become a physics professor at the University of 
Chicago. 

When the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949, 
Teller persuaded the Truman administration to push ahead 
on H-bomb research. He returned to Los Alamos and worked 
on the bomb through the first megaton-scale explosion at 
Eniwetok in the Pacific in 1952. 

At the same time, Teller pushed for the creation of a second 
national science lab - Lawrence Livermore. He became a 
consultant there in 1952, associate director in 1954 and 
director from 1958-60. He continued as a consultant at the 
lab after retiring in 1975. 

In a 1990 interview with The Associated Press, Teller said 
that development of the Livermore lab, near San Francisco, 
was one of his most important accomplishments. 

"A single laboratory is not capable of criticizing itself," he 
said. "By competition, the quality of work is greatly increased." 

While Teller was beginning his work at Livermore, he began 
attacking Oppenheimer, who had directed the Manhattan 
Project. Teller claimed he had slowed development of the 
H-bomb, allowing the Soviet Union to catch up. 

In two secret interviews with the FBI in 1952 - made public 
under the Freedom of Information Act in 1977 - Teller made 
statements casting doubt on Oppenheimer's actions. 

The allegations became the basis for the most serious charges 
brought against Oppenheimer in 1954 when his security 
clearance was lifted. 

In his memoirs, published in 2001, Teller remained critical of 
Oppenheimer, but said the hearing was a mistake and he was 
stupid to testify. Teller also said he was motivated not by 
Oppenheimer's opposition to the hydrogen bomb, but by the 
way Oppenheimer had treated a third man. 

Yet Teller himself may have unwittingly spurred the Soviet 
H-bomb project. Teller ignored doubts by physicists about 
his H-bomb design at a conference in 1946 and went ahead 
with an optimistic assessment of the project. 

The result was an eventual go-ahead from Truman, and a leak 
to the Soviets about the superbomb from conference participant 
Klaus Fuchs. 

Fuchs' information, based on Teller's flawed early design, 
may actually have misled the Soviets and hampered their 
H-bomb program. But the United States' decision to forge 
ahead with its own project had the effect of laying down a 
challenge to the Soviets. 

In the end, Teller was right about the feasibility of the 
H-bomb, but he repeated the same pattern of seeming to 
oversell technology in 1983 when he persuaded President 
Reagan that space-based laser weapons could provide a 
secure anti-missile defense. 

Reagan bought the idea and proposed the multibillion-dollar 
Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars." 

Computer experts raised doubts early on about the reliability 
of the complex software required for a Star Wars system. But 
even as the evidence mounted that Star Wars would cost billions 
more than originally expected and would take years longer to 
develop, Teller continued to support it. 

In an interview in 2001, Teller showed his old fighting spirit, 
delivering the two-word endorsement - "High time!" - to 
President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s decision to 
pull out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia 
to work on a missile defense shield. 

"So many times I have been asked whether I regret having 
worked on the atomic and hydrogen bombs," he wrote in his 
autobiography, "Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in 
Science and Politics." "My answer is no. I deeply regret the 
deaths and injuries 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?" 

Teller's wife of 66 years, Mici, died in 2000. He is survived 
by his son, Paul Teller, his daughter, Wendy Teller, four grand-
children and a great grandchild. 

___ 

On the Net: 

Hoover Institute Web site 

http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/teller.html 
___ .

mata kimasitayo
kimasita AT bloomington.in.us

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     non ridere, non lugere, 
     neque detestari, sed intelligere.   
     -- b. spinoza 
     (tractatus politicus, cap. I, par. 4)
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