Edward Teller: Visionary or Madman?

Great Debates
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Edward Teller is dead at age 95. A nearly lifelong advocate of nuclear power and the hydrogen bomb, Teller went to great lengths to promote the peaceful use of nuclear explosives. To this end, he aggressively pursued the detonation of several nuclear devices at Point Hope, Alaska for the express purpose of creating a deep harbor for shipping.

This was an involved story, graphically related in Dan O’Neill’s book, “The Firecracker Boys”. Teller made every possible argument for this project and sold a lot of snake oil in the process. One of the outcomes of the battle was the concept of the environmental impact study, which ultimately led to the defeat of Teller’s single-minded idea.

The nearly complete disregard for the Eskimos of Point Hope and neighboring villages, the wildlife of the area that they depend upon for subsistence, and the forage that these animals consume was staggering in its arrogance.

I apologize for no cites for the above, but would have to quote large chunks of O’Neill’s book to do so.

In addition, Teller was an aggressive opponent of Oppenheimer, going so far as to hint that he was working for the Soviets, which resulted in Oppenheimer losing his security clearance.

Was Teller a visionary in regard to using controlled nuclear detonations for “moving mountains”, or was he completely off his rocker?

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Both.

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He’s also one of the major forces advocating SDI (Star Wars) and is supposed to have suggested the “Star Wars” name to Reagan.

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I’ll second our good Brother. There is a short gap between being a visionary and seeing thing that ain’t there and there is little in science that requires a scientist to not be a raving loon.

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To quote Grampa Simpson when asked by the Feds if he was trying to stall them by rambling or whether he as just senile,

“A little from column A, and a little from column B…”

There’s no denying Teller’s technical genius. Nor his patriotism towards his adopted homeland. Unlike so many of the other atomic scientists, he knew that the US would not (and for four years DID not) abuse a nuclear monopoly. That helping the Soviets was not, in any way, a good thing.

For that I’d cut him some slack for not seeing the impracticality of so-called nuclear excavation.

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The problem becomes one of ends justifying the means. Teller outright lied about the effects of fallout in order to further his agenda. Many of his ‘facts’ were based largely on theory and conjecture, not on hard science; when confronted with this, he actually made things up as he went along.

It was shown later that the size of the charges he was considering for his harbor were far in excess of what would have been needed, and the fallout–coupled with prevailing winds–would have been disastrous, all of which he consistently denied. A technical genius he may have been, but his methods make his agenda suspect.

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Well, no wonder he went mad. Penn would never let him talk!

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Of course I cut him slack–technical types often need to be kept away from a public forum. (admit it–you know techs whose boss won’t allow them to talk to customers :wink: ) The only difference between him and a thousand other talented crackpots is that his greater talents put him in the public eye and gave him that forum and his cracked notions were listened to and taken seriously.

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I saw a minor-league example of Teller’s carelessness with facts on an interview he did with William F. Buckley. Teller had been a proponent of giving the enemy a demonstration of the power of the atomic bomb before it was actually used.

Buckely asked him for a scenario of how this would work in order to not be dangerous to the Japanese or to our guys dropping the bomb. Teller said that a bomb could have been exploded at 40,000 ft. several miles off the coast of Yokohama. But at that time the US had no conceivable way of getting an atomic bomb to 40,000 ft. at all, let alone dropping it from a B-29, alowing the plane time to get away and having the bomb then explode at 40,000 ft.

My immediate thought was, “I hope the Star Wars thing has been a little better thought out than this.”

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And of course the answer to that particular hope was, "Bwahahahahahahahahahaha…Oh wait, you’re serious?!?

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Well, yes and no. Unfortunately, Teller’s idle dreams were taken seriously by people like The Gipper and GW. Buckley didn’t see anything at all wrong with the plan as Teller described it, only the wisdom of showing off the bomb.

I don’t think we need to worry about Star Wars too much. With our new strategy of preemptive war followed by “nation building,” there might not be money left to pursue it.

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Well, yes and no. Unfortunately, Teller’s idle dreams were taken seriously by people like The Gipper and GW. Buckley didn’t see anything at all wrong with the plan as Teller described it, only the wisdom of showing off the bomb.

I don’t think we need to worry about Star Wars too much. With our new strategy of preemptive war followed by “nation building,” there might not be money left to pursue it.

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“He’s crazy! I’m not the first Teller!!!”

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In fairness to Teller (and I never thought type that phrase) he wasn’t the only theoretician to believe that fallout and residue radiation were simply design flaws that could somehow be engineered out of a next generation of nuclear explosives.

Same thing with the idea of exploding a bomb at 40,000 feet. That was simply an operational detail, nothing to get in the way of the bigger picture.

Prone to shooting his mouth off, yes. But that didn’t make him a madman.

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No, no, no. Buckley’s interview question and Teller’s answer had nothing to do with what could possibly have been done in 1945 with a little further engineering development. Teller’s point was that in late summer of 1945 we could, and in his opinion should, have made a demonstration to the Japanese before actually using an attomic bomb on a Japanese city.

And when pressed for details about how such a demonstration would work he came up with “… a bomb could have been exploded at 40,000 ft …” at that time. As an earlier poster suggested, it appeared that he really hadn’t thought through what would be involved in setting up such a demonstration so he just winged it, and with the technology available at the time of the interview 40,000 ft. wouldn’t have been a problem so he used that.

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If one tries to look for the reasons behind choosing a remote site such as Point Hope for this grand experiment, one comes to some fairly inescapable conclusions.

Alaska has long been thought to consist of large tracts of wasteland. The Native peoples are somewhat remote and inaccessible and far beneath the national radar screen. Teller chose this site, IMO, because he correctly surmised that resistance would be light and because if there were some sort of ecological/human disaster, the repercussions would be minimal.

Ostensibly, his logic for creating a deep water site was to provide access to the coal fields, dismissing the arguments that millions would have to be spent for rail lines to said fields and that the harbor would only be accessible for about three months out of every year. When asked about the Native population, he said they could find work as coal miners.

While admittedly based somewhat in supposition by me, this thought process would seem to point to a disturbed, fixated individual who would stop at little to gain what he perceived to be a logical end. In essence, he was willing to ‘push the button’ just to see what would happen, considering the risk and possible collateral damage to be acceptable.

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The issue’s actually arguably murkier than quibbling over the practical details of this proposal. It’s been disputed whether Teller even ever held this opinion. The background is that, in the months prior to Hiroshima, Leo Szilard was circulating a petition amongst Manhatten Project scientists calling for the weapon not to be used in a surprise attack. Teller, as an old friend of his and a prominent scientist within the programme, was a particularly promising case for Szilard to persuade to sign. In Teller’s version, he agreed and then took the petition to Oppenheimer, who proceeded to argue that politics was better left to politicians than scientists. Teller said this convinced him.
At this point he writes a detailed letter to Szilard explaining his reasoning for doing nothing. There are several interesting personal rationalisations, but the crucial political argument is that the best hope for the future of humanity is that people fully understand the scale of nuclear weaponry. And, unfortunately, the best way of doing this is to use one.
So, in this version, Teller believed in a harmless demonstration bombing, but then changed his mind. If so, his grasp of the practicalities of such a demonstration are largely neither here nor there. He’d decided against it for other reasons. Yet this hardly puts him in a position to claim that he’d opposed the bombing (other in the technical sense of having ever so briefly done so).
But there is also the suggestion that the whole “Oppenheimer conversion” story may be a fabrication. Martin Sherwin pointed out (in A World Destroyed, 1975; Vintage, 1977, p217-9) that Teller’s documented reaction to Szilard’s approach was to write to Oppenheimer poo-pooing it.

Any word on the health of Edward Anti-Teller ?

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All of this seems to be more seesawing on Teller’s part. I sat on my sofa and watched the whole interview with William F. Buckley on Firing Line and Teller was asked about this very thing. He did not object when Buckley said that he, Teller, has favored a demonstration and then proceeded with the scenario as I described it when Buckley asked for some details.

I, unfortunately, don’t have a library that includes tapes of Firing Line

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Nobody’s yet pointed out several other reasons that Teller is one of the most despicable men of the 20th century. (Okay, it’s late, and I’m working from memory here, so some of this may be a little shaky.)

His vanity and selfishness. While at Los Alamos during the war, he refused to contribute to the development of the implosion device (the Nagasaki bomb), because he felt, unlike any of the other physicists, that they should start working on the Super (H-bomb). Robert Oppenheimer, who was in charge, had to move him off to his own section, nominally to work on the Super, because he was getting in the way of other people who were doing real and useful work. His contribution to the success of the Manhattan project was essentially nil.

His taking of undeserved credit. The so-called Teller-Ulam breakthrough that made the Super possible was almost entirely Stan Ulam’s work, with only a small contribution from Teller. But Ulam was modest and not inclined to self-promotion, so Teller took the credit and became “Father of the H-Bomb.”

His betrayal of Oppenheimer. Essentially, Teller was single-handedly responsible for the removal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance in the 1950s, a move that destroyed Oppie’s career and spirit. Teller had no justification, other than spite and jealousy, for testifying that he believed Oppenheimer was a security risk.

These facts, his instigation of the Star Wars fraud, the many things mentioned above, and much, much more, make him, IMO, one of the most harmful, dangerous, and (I never use this word) evil men of the last century. Far, far worse than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Good riddance, Edward Teller.

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Mein Führer! I can walk!