Edward Teller

Edward Teller (original Hungarian name Teller Ede) (January 15, 1908 – September 9 2003) was a Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist of Jewish descent. He was known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb."

The hydrogen bomb

Following the Soviet Union's first test detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949, President Truman announced a crash development program for a hydrogen bomb. Teller returned to Los Alamos in 1950 to work on the project. Teller quickly grew impatient with the progress of the program, insisted on involving more theorists, and accused his colleagues of lacking imagination. This worsened his relations with other researchers. None of his designs (or anyone else's), however, were yet workable. Hans Bethe thought that had Teller not pressed for an early H-bomb test, the Russians' own development might possibly have been slowed down, particularly in light of the fact that the information which Klaus Fuchs gave them contained many incorrect technical details which rendered a workable H-bomb unfeasible. Russian scientists who had worked on the Soviet hydrogen bomb have claimed that they could see that the early ideas were infeasible as well as anyone else who had looked at them did, and also claimed that they developed their H-bomb wholly independently.http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=may93khariton

Related Topics:
Soviet Union - 1949 - Truman - Hans Bethe - Klaus Fuchs

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In 1950, calculations by the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and his collaborator Cornelius Everett, along with confirmations by Fermi, had showed that not only was Teller's earlier estimate of the quantity of Tritium needed for the H bomb a low one, but that even with a higher amount of Tritium, the energy losses in the fusion process would be too great to enable the fusion reaction to propagate. However, in 1951, after still many years of fruitless labor on the "Super," an innovative idea from Ulam was seized upon by Teller and developed into the first workable design for a megaton-range hydrogen bomb. The exact amount of contribution provided respectedly from Ulam and Teller to what became known as the Teller-Ulam design is not decidedly known in the public domain—the degree of credit assigned to Teller by his contemporaries is almost exactly commensurate with how well they thought of Teller in general. In an interview with Scientific American from 1999, Teller told the reporter:

Related Topics:
Stanislaw Ulam - Teller-Ulam design - Scientific American

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:"I contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissastified with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, 'I don't believe in it.'"

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None of Teller's Los Alamos colleagues, though, agree with this assessment. Bethe gave Teller "51%" of the credit for the creation of the H-bomb, while other scientists (those more antagonistic to Teller, such as J. Carson Mark) have claimed that Teller would have never gotten any closer without the assistance of Ulam and others.http://www.lanl.gov/history/people/J_Mark.shtmlhttp://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ja03carlson

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The breakthrough—the details of which are still classified—was apparently the separation of the fission and fusion components of the weapons, and to use the radiation produced by the fission bomb to first compress the fusion fuel before igniting it. However, compression alone would not have been enough and the other crucial idea—staging the bomb by separating the primary and secondary—seems to have been exclusively contributed by Ulam. Also, Ulam's idea seems to have been to use mechanical shock from the primary to encourage fusion in the secondary, while Teller quickly realised that radiation from the primary would do the job much more early and more efficiently. Evidently, Teller pounced on this brainwave and used it to highlight his contribution. However, many members of the lab, including Carson Mark, think that the idea to use radiation would have occurred to anybody if he started to think about the physical processes involved. They also think that the obvious reason why Teller thought of radiation right away was because he was already working on the 'Greenhouse' tests for the spring of 1951, in which the effect of the energy from a fission bomb on a mixture of deuterium and tritium was going to be investigated.

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The elegance of the design impressed many scientists, to the point that some who had previously wondered if it was feasible at all suddenly believed that it was inevitable that it would be created by both the USA and USSR. Even Oppenheimer, who was originally opposed to the project, called the idea "technically sweet".

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Though he had helped to come up with the design and had been a long-time proponent of the concept, Teller was not chosen to head the development project (his reputation as being a poor team player probably played a role in this). In 1952 he left Los Alamos and joined the newly established Livermore branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory, which had been created largely through his urging. After the detonation of "Ivy Mike", the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the Teller-Ulam configuration, on November 1, 1952, Teller became known in the press as the "father of the hydrogen bomb." Interestingly, Teller refrained from attending the test and instead saw its results on a seismograph in Berkeley. Ironically, by analysing the fallout from this test, the Soviets (led in their H-bomb work by Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov) could have easily concluded that the new design had used compression as the key initiator, and this may have speeded up their own bomb effort. Because of official secrecy, little information about the bomb's development was released by the government, and press reports often attributed the entire weapon's design and development to Teller and his new Livermore Laboratory (when it was actually developed by Los Alamos).

Related Topics:
Livermore - University of California Radiation Laboratory - Ivy Mike - November 1 - Soviet - Andrei Sakharov

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Many of Teller's colleagues were irritated that he seemed to enjoy taking full credit for something he had only a part in, and in response, with encouragement from Enrico Fermi, Teller authored an article titled "The Work of Many People," which appeared in Science magazine in February, 1955, emphasizing that he was not alone in the weapon's development (he would later write in his memoirs that he had told a "white lie" in the 1955 article, and would imply that he should receive full credit for the weapon's invention).http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/phisci/Newsletters/newslet_52.html Hans Bethe, who also participated in the hydrogen bomb project, once drolly said, "For the sake of history, I think it is more precise to say that Ulam is the father, because he provided the seed, and Teller is the mother, because he remained with the child. As for me, I guess I am the midwife."

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Teller was often known for getting engrossed in projects which were theoretically interesting but practically infeasible (the classical "Super" was one such project). About his work on the hydrogen bomb, Hans Bethe said:

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:"Nobody blamed Teller because the calculations of 1946 were wrong, especially because adequate computing machines were not available at Los Alamos. But he was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous programme on the basis of calculations, which he himself must have known to have been very incomplete."

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During the Manhattan Project, Teller also advocated for the development of a bomb using uranium hydride, which many of his fellow theorists said would be unlikely to work. At Livermore, Teller continued work on the hydride bomb, and the result was a dud. Ulam once wrote to a colleague about an idea he had shared with Teller: "Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities; this is perhaps an indication they will not work". Fermi once said that Teller was the only monomaniac he knew who had several manias.

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