When Jews were ridiculed, persecuted, rounded up and shot in post-World War I Hungary, Edward Teller was forced to leave.
When a similar situation broke out in Third Reich Germany, the theoretical physicist was again forced to pack his bags.
By the time he settled in the United States, Teller — the driving force behind the development of the hydrogen bomb — was determined that neither he nor his fellow citizens be forced to relocate again.
Now 94, the once-fiery Teller speaks slowly and quietly — but forcefully — in strongly accented English. Holding court in his home tucked away in a secluded corner of the Stanford University campus, the Hoover Institute fellow rests in a recliner that seems almost custom-made for his small frame.
He is prone to long silences, but when he speaks his answers are thoughtful and lucid as he gauges his brilliant and triumphant, but controversial career.
After a decade of work, Teller recently released his autobiography, “Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey In Science and Politics.” He believes the tome may help shed light on his work and motivations, considering much of the dialogue on the matter has been supplied by his detractors.
Teller spent the war years toiling on the Manhattan Project, developing the fission bomb. But he always felt American security rested in the development of the H-bomb — or, as he called it, “The Super” — before the Soviets got to it. He chalks up his fierce advocacy of The Super as “the only important thing I ever did.”
The Soviets’ 1949 detonation of a fission bomb “came as a surprise to most people, but not to me. After that, there was no question in my mind we had to go ahead. If not, then our interview today would be in Russian,” he said.
When the war was over, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, instructed Teller to drop his research. “That, I believe, was the wrong decision, and the way it was arrived at was even more wrong,” said Teller. “In spite of this, I essentially stopped for four years, only [restarting] after the Soviets made surprising progress in the fission weapon.”
Teller’s relentless promotion of the H-bomb and a strong national defense “resulted in the loss of most of my friends among physicists. That was a genuinely hard thing to do.”
While never a religious man, his Judaism left an indelible mark on Teller’s life — and, subsequently, history of the U.S. and the world.
With the anti-Semitic Horthy regime ruling Hungary, Teller’s father sent his teenaged son to be educated in Germany, where he felt it would be safer for a Jew. While a fantastic statement in retrospect, Teller recalls only one anti-Semitic run-in in seven years in Germany — though he remembers it well.
After being insulted for no apparent reason by a laboratory assistant, Teller was told the man lost a leg in World War I and therefore hates Jews. He didn’t understand the “therefore.”
“The Jews lost the war for Germany. It was not true, but that is what was said,” recalled Teller, a founder and director emeritus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
While Teller felt safe within the insulating walls of academia, the rise of Hitler terrified him. “The fears of my childhood — war, destruction, death — were being made reality, but the German people around me were unprotesting,” Teller wrote in his memoirs.
He left Germany in 1933, and settled in London with his wife by 1934. Many of his childhood friends were slaughtered in the Holocaust, but his parents and sister survived.
Members of Hungary’s anti-Semitic Arrow Cross party “rounded up thousands of Jewish men, women and children, and with no attempt to hide what they were doing, took them to the banks of the Danube, shot them with machine guns, and threw the dead and dying into the river,” he wrote.
“While dead and dying Jews were being shoved into the icy Danube near the ruined Chain Bridge, I was safe and comfortable in Los Alamos and thinking about how the plutonium bomb might be completed in the least time.”
Teller’s belief in strong national defense led him to become a key figure behind Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative, and Teller remains an ardent advocate of President Bush’s proposed missile shield. Even in a day and age when terrorists can utilize box cutters and jets to kill thousands, Teller warns that “thousands is less than millions.”
While widely recognized as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” Teller defers sole credit.
“I believe I was a not unimportant part of that work. But to say I am the father of it is an exaggeration, and I don’t like it,” he said. “I did other things I like better. The thing I did with the hydrogen bomb was to stand up to the clever opponents of it, which nobody else was willing to do.”