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.
