Every Issue of The Monthly to your door: Subscribe Online

Respond to this Book Review
Washington Monthly Home Page

October 2001

Memoirs: A Twenthieth Century Life By Edward Teller Perseus Books Click on the title to buy the book

In the decades after Hiroshima, most of the physicists who had conceived and built the first fission weapons and their thermonuclear successors had the grace to admit that there might be some drawbacks to their achievement. Many of these physicists lent their weight to lobbying for arms control, while the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the house organ for such types, used as its banner the clever device of a clock set close to midnight to warn how close we were to extinction.

Edward Teller was always the exception among the original elite Los Alamos team. He really liked nuclear weapons, said so repeatedly, and resented prevailing prejudices against their further development and use. In an understandable paradox, he promoted the cause of his beloved monsters by arguing that they weren't really all that dangerous, deriding descriptions of their apocalyptic consequences as "dangerous myth" and citing the "fact" that streetcars were running in Hiroshima within three days of the first bomb---an utter canard (it actually took three months for mass transit to begin moving amid the nuclear ruins).

True to his beliefs, Teller argued forcefully for nonmilitary use of nuclear explosives in digging canals or gouging out harbors while energetically lobbying for ballistic missile defense (using nuclear weapons, of course) decades before he found a ready audience in Ronald Reagan. Some of his non-nuclear activities were hardly more appealing, most infamously his betrayal, through damning testimony, of his colleague and friend Robert Oppenheimer when the witch-hunters went after him in 1954---an act for which many old friends and colleagues never forgave him.

Now, at the age of 93, Teller has produced his memoirs. Not surprisingly, they present a kinder, gentler Teller, an engaging self-portrait of a brilliant gadfly who spent much of his life in the company of other genii, many of whom he had known since childhood. It is astonishing how the world was changed by a small group of Hungarians. During his last two years at school, for example, Teller met three young men who were, like him, from the Jewish community in Budapest: Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Leo Szilard. They would talk after school about physics. Szilard later conceived the notion of an atomic chain reaction and went on to convince Roosevelt to start the American bomb project, while von Neumann and Wigner also played significant roles. Moving on to Germany and Denmark, Teller rubbed minds with other towering intellects, including Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Lev Landau, and Niels Bohr.

These brilliant physicists were a close fraternity, and even Heisenberg, who remained in Hitler's Germany while the others fled, retained the affection of his peers. It was Teller himself who poisoned the punchbowl by his role, sparked by ambition and old jealousies, in the downfall of Oppenheimer.

Teller himself protests in his memoirs that he hadn't really meant to damage Oppenheimer and that his role in the security hearings had been a reluctant one. But he protests a little too much. Teller was a most helpful source for the FBI agents investigating the man who had directed Los Alamos on suspicion of spying for the Soviets. He also urged that Oppenheimer be charged with giving "consistently bad advice," curbing the development of the hydrogen bomb. Penning his memoirs almost half a century later, Teller recalls plenty of disobliging stories about his old colleague and friend, suggesting that the rancor has not died away.

The H-bomb was Teller's greatest love, and he pursued it with undeviating passion even during the war, to the irritation of colleagues who were still trying to figure out how to make an A-bomb work. (I could never understand why they kept him around.) Hence his chagrin at the fact that the conceptual breakthrough that made the (American) thermonuclear weapon possible has always been attributed to him and Stanislaw Ulam jointly. "What's this?" he exclaimed when shown the patent application for the H-bomb, which Ulam had already signed. "I am the inventor of the hydrogen bomb." His peevishness has evidently not died away, given his painstaking efforts in these pages to demonstrate that Ulam does not deserve any real credit for this dubious achievement.

Today, in his semi-dotage, Teller must be a happy man. Most of the peers who so despised him for his actions in the Oppenheimer affair are long dead. The communist system that he hated with such unbridled passion has been utterly vanquished, but without extinguishing the market for some of his favorite weapons concepts. And George W. Bush is ready to pour money into the latest incarnation of ballistic missile defense, an idea no more feasible today than it was when Teller first started talking about it back in the 1950s.