Edward Teller

Dr. Edward Teller is probably the best known nuclear weapons proponent of all time. He began his career as a weapons scientist on the eve of World War II and continued to promote advanced weaponry for the next sixty years.

Teller was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1908 and completed most of his physics education in Germany. He received his Ph.D. in 1930 and left Germany in 1934 with help from the Jewish Rescue Committee. A year later he moved to the United States and became a professor of physics at George Washington University.

Teller left his academic position in 1943 to join the group of scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, who were developing the first atomic bomb. At first he worked in the Theoretical Physics division under his close friend Hans Bethe, but tension developed when he refused to perform calculations needed for the A-bomb. Teller believed that problems of the atomc bomb were essentially solved and preferred to work on theoretical issues of a still more powerful weapon, the hydrogen bomb. Rather than lose Teller from the Manhattan project, scientific director Robert Oppenheimer tried in 1944 to accommodate Teller by placing him in charge of a special 12-person group that would concentrate on H-bomb calculations.

Teller returned to academia in 1946, citing frustration with the post-war pace of nuclear weapons research. He continued to spend summers at Los Alamos, and in 1949 returned there on a full-time basis. That same year, the Soviets detonated their first A-bomb, enabling Teller to drum up support for an accelerated program to build an H-bomb. Most other nuclear scientists, however, urged restraint. In the fall of 1949 the scientific advisory committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (GAC), headed by Robert Oppenheimer, voted 8-0 against a "crash" H-bomb program, judging it morally questionable and not militarily necessary.