Edward Teller: Physics and Politics

Edward Teller was born in Hungary in 1908, and moved to the United States in 1935. In 1942, he became part of the Manhattan Project, and in 1943 started working in Los Alamos. While there, he worked somewhat on the core mission of the project, the development of a fission bomb, but he worked more eagerly on the development of a fusion bomb. In the postwar years, he continued to work in varying capacities on the fusion bomb. The first successful demonstration of it happened in 1952.

Some newspaper reporters began referring to Teller as the “father of the hydrogen bomb.” Yet this is debatable. Stanislaw Ulam also did significant work on the project, and could conceivably earn this title. More accurately, it was a team effort, and no one individual could claim sole credit. The hydrogen bomb even had a mother: Maria Goeppert Mayer. Born in Germany, she worked with both Teller and Ulam.

By the same token, probably no one individual earns the title of “father of the atomic bomb,” although that phrase has been used on several individuals: Albert Einstein, whose famous equation pointed to the convertibility of matter to energy and who wrote of it to President Roosevelt; General Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan Project; Robert Oppenheimer, who managed the project; President Truman, who directly ordered the use of the bomb; and perhaps others.

Scientific research and industrial development of processes like fission and fusion are too complicated to be the product of one man. It was all teamwork.

At several points in time in the postwar century, various individuals raised the question of whether it had been ethically acceptable to develop and use the atomic bomb; later the same question was raised about the development of the hydrogen bomb.

In a 1999 interview with Teller, author Gary Stix asked about these ethical concerns:

What would have happened, I ask, if we hadn’t developed the hydrogen bomb? “You would now interview me in Russian, but more probably you wouldn’t interview me at all. And I wouldn’t be alive. I would have died in a concentration camp.”

Teller understood the dynamics of deterrence. Ultimately, the Cold War ended without a face-to-face war between the USSR and the United States. World War III was averted. Brinkmanship avoided the many millions of casualties and the devastating nuclear explosions which would probably have been part of that war.

The analytic skills needed in physics are transferable to geo-political history: Teller concluded that the Soviet Socialists were essentially of the same nature as the Fascists, the Nazis, and the Japanese militarists. He opposed them all, as Gary Stix writes:

Teller’s persona — the scientist-cum-hawkish politico — is rooted in the upheavals that rocked Europe during the first half of the century, particularly the Communist takeover of Hungary in 1919. “My father was a lawyer; his office was occupied and shut down and occupied by the Reds. But what followed was an anti-Semitic Fascist regime, and I was at least as opposed to the Fascists as I was to the Communists.”

Technological and scientific development would be the way to preserve freedom and liberty, and to eventually dismantle Soviet Socialism, in Teller’s view. He promoted a full effort to develop nearly every aspect of high-tech warfare, from the atomic and hydrogen bombs to missile defense systems to protect America’s civilian population.

Avoid war by continually developing ever more powerful weapons, and by showing the enemy that the United States was ready to use them. In the end, the Soviet Socialists couldn’t keep up the pace of research and development: financially, they couldn’t afford it.

It was a war of economic attrition:

The Soviets could never compete with America’s electronic weaponry — and even less with the northern Californian economic vibrancy that produced Macintosh computers and Pentium processors.

Teller’s vision of technology as the best path to peace was confirmed:

In the end, microchips and recombinant DNA — two foundations of the millennial economy — helped to spur the end of the cold war.

Edward Teller was not only a superlative physicist and a brilliant geo-political strategist, but rather he also explored questions of earth science. He was one of the first to use the phrase “greenhouse effect” — perhaps he was even the very first. He spoke of it in 1959. He also later proposed his own solution to it: having concluded that reduced CO2 emissions were impractical, he advocated releasing fine particles into the upper atmosphere.

On various topics, when he thought, he thought big. The term “Tellerism” is still occasionally used to describe a grandiose way of thinking and the promotion of grandiose solutions to problems.

The Earth’s Carrying Capacity is Larger Than Expected

What is the link between China’s population policy and the enduring hypothesis that the planet Earth can support only a relatively small population? How has China’s population policy changed over the years? How has our understanding of Earth’s carrying capacity changed? Is China’s population policy about science, or about economic and political control?

There is a complex and tangled set of connections between the policy decisions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and research indicating that the planet’s carrying capacity is large and even expandable.

The trend is clear, even if precise dates and quantities are difficult to specify: China went from a policy which allowed couples to have, at most one child, to a policy which allowed two children. That happened around 2015 or 2016. Then came a shift from allowing couples to have more children to encouraging them to have more children, and the two-child limit was lifted. The Chinese government is now actively rewarding couples for having three, or sometimes more, children.

China launched the one-child policy in the late 1970s. The policy was supposed to prevent food shortages. Although the population growth dropped significantly, there was no direct effect on concerns about the food supply. After several decades, however, the policy showed itself to be both socially and economically damaging. In a dramatic about-face, the Chinese government now wants to see fertile couples producing babies in large quantities.

More specifically, the economic harm caused by the one-child policy was that it led to a situation in which a relatively small number of young working people would be providing benefits to a large number of aging retirees. The ratio of people under the age of retirement to those over the age of retirement constitutes a solid economic wall.

The textbook example is four grandparents, two parents, and one child. Eventually, there is a ratio of one to six, and this ratio is not sustainable.

There were several flawed assumptions on which China’s one-child policy was based. One of them was that the planet has a carrying capacity which is both fixed and relatively low. This assumption led to questions, as author Michael Salemink writes:

Can the world’s resources support so many bodies? Should we encourage couples to procreate fewer children? May governments intervene if they don’t? It appears, however, that the Earth’s carrying capacity is not fixed. Technological and scientific innovations allow for increasing quantities of sustainable and renewable healthy food, clean water, and clean air.

The planet’s carrying capacity is not fixed, and it is not low. At present, a modest estimate of food production shows that the Earth currently produces enough food for at least ten billion people, and probably more, giving food waste in some first-world countries.

This current level of food production is achieved without using all available tillable land, and using suboptimal technology. Using more tillable land, and using more efficient agricultural standards would provide an increase in the food supply. Beyond that, however, concepts like oceanic seaweed farms would expand the food supply on an order of several magnitudes.

How did the idea of “overpopulation” arise? One starting point was the written works of Thomas Malthus. Many students are taught about Malthus, but aren’t actually given unabridged versions of his texts to read. Many of those who teach have themselves seen only snippets of his essays. This line of transmission allows Malthus to be presented as an alarmist, predicting global catastrophe because of overpopulation. A calmer, more nuanced, and more thorough reading of his books suggests that Malthus was simply pointing out that life on planet Earth will never be unproblematic. Michael Salemink explains:

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich threatened in 1968 that global population surges were leading to imminent mass starvations. His prophecies have failed.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a series of alarmist writings about ‘overpopulation.’ But “research has repeatedly and thoroughly discredited” Ehrlich’s sensationalistic scaremongering.

While it is difficult or impossible to give a precise number to the planet’s carrying capacity, it is clear that it is far greater than the current population, and greater than any near-term possible population. Yet the fallacy of an overpopulated Earth persists, as Michael Salemink explains:

Many contemporary environmentalists keep laying the blame for deforestation, fossil-fuel depletion, animal-species extinction, and climate change at the feet of unrestrained human fertility. They insist that lest we selfishly elevate our own desires over the welfare of future generations, we must all take responsibility for limiting childbirths.

The enduring misconception not only continues to influence perceptions, but rather also policy. Mistakenly believing that Earth is at or near some upper limit, governments, like the Chinese Communist Party, take actions — actions which, being based on misinformation, are harmful.

Not only the CCP, but other policy groups around the world, concluded that efforts should be diverted away from food production — which they considered to be a futile effort — and directed toward population reduction. But “demographic data do not corroborate these conclusions.”

There are data about the various factors which influence population, and these data point toward a carrying capacity which is much higher than previously thought, as Michael Salemink reports:

International authorities indicate that current food production could sustain ten billion people. Freshwater withdrawals have risen seven times over the last hundred years, but population has only gone up four-fold. Presently, fewer than eight billion bodies inhabit the planet. Every individual could have five acres of her own land, a whole half acre of it suitable for farming. An area the size of Texas could house us all, and the population density would still be lower than many cities. If all we needed was space to sleep, we could fit in Connecticut, leaving the rest of the world wide open.

The factors which have led to increasing estimates of the Earth’s carrying capacity include sea farming and sustainable land usage. These estimates include clean air, clean water, and nutritious food. Energy, raw materials, finished goods, and food are all calculated as being produced in sustainable and renewable ways.

These are also calculated at a level which would be a net increase for much of the world’s population, i.e., a reasonable approximation of a first-world standard of living: HVAC, running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, internet access, mechanized transportation, etc., which would be an improvement for millions or even billions of people who currently have a developing-world standard of living.

The larger-than-anticipated carrying capacity is merely one of several surprises: not only can the earth support larger populations, but a steadily growing population is beneficial to economies, civilizations, and the environment.

A steadily growing population is contrasted to an erratically growing population or a rapidly growing population, as well as to a declining population or a “zero-growth” population.

In a majority of economic models, an evenly increasing population produces more reliable growth, more equitable income distribution, and more opportunities for individuals than populations with other growth patterns. Consequently, steady population growth is better for civilization and for the physical and social structures which civilization requires.

Somewhat more speculatively, these effects could be extended to an increasing likelihood of peace, civil and human rights, and civil and political liberty.

Perhaps most surprisingly, a growing population is not only consistent with good environmental stewardship, but rather actually supports environmental care.

A growing population was thought, in the 1960s, to pose a threat to the environment, but in the meantime, it has become clear that a steadily growing population ensures a relatively large number of young laborers continuously entering the workforce. Green business practices, which are labor-intensive and cannot be effectively mechanized, require these younger employees.

A “zero-growth” or shrinking population harms economies and destabilizes societies, and fewer business are able to adopt green practices, as Michael Salemink notes:

This puts further pressure on industries and economies, as the population gets older with fewer working-age people to support it. One model predicts world population reaching a pinnacle of 8.3 billion by 2050 and then dropping. Once this trend begins, it becomes increasingly difficult to escape, because fewer people have fewer children who have fewer children of their own and so on.

Work toward goals like environmental conservation, decreased poverty, and strong economies requires workers. More, not less, human creativity and ingenuity can address these challenges. People are the greatest resource and asset in the struggle for all those desiderata.

The question poses itself: if the planet has such a large carrying capacity, why are there people with too little food and too little water? Why is there still some extreme poverty — although the United Nations reports that instances of “extreme poverty” have declined significantly in recent decades? The reader will quickly see that many similar and related questions can be formulated.

Hardship and poverty exist, despite Earth’s grand carrying capacity, because of dishonest greed. Simply put, poverty is an artificially created social problem, and does not arise out of a shortage of resources. With a current population of around eight billion people as of early 2024, the plant presently produces foodstuff for approximately ten billion people. There are a few honest mistakes which contribute to the problem, but more often it is deliberate selfishness and malice which lead to malnutrition and other suffering.

Distribution of resources can either be liberated to allow food to flow to where it is most needed, or be controlled so that the delivery of food is prevented from going to some of the places where it is most scarce. The dictators who rule nations of starving people invariably live in great luxury.

Time, money, and energy which could be used to deliver food are hijacked for other social and political projects, as Michael Salemink chronicles:

Having more people actually turns out to be advantageous for the fight. History has continually confirmed that more minds and more hands equal more solutions. Whenever societies have overcome poverty, they have done so utilizing collective infrastructures. Sometimes certain segments of the public must become more comfortable with a less luxurious standard of living. If inadequate distribution bears more fault than insufficient production for poverty, then it seems beneficial to add more buckets to the brigade. On the other hand, devoting precious resources to “family planning” or “population control” measures only aggravates the predicament, particularly when impoverished people need bodily essentials instead of lectures about sex.

Humanity will be greatly served if it abandons concerns about “overpopulation,” and instead seeks reasonably steady population growth, which will in turn address numerous other problems in society and civilization.