Edward Teller Interview (page: 4 / 6) Father of the Hydrogen Bomb	Print Interview

When Hitler came to power, you knew you would have to leave Germany. How did you get out? So many wanted to leave but had no place to go.

Edward Teller: The physicists in the world worked together very effectively, and those of us who wanted to leave had an easy possibility to do so. I arrived in London in the fall of 1934. There was a meeting at which the great nuclear physicist Lord Rutherford talked. What about? Nuclear energy. "Complete nonsense!" he said. "Nuclear questions are pure physics, they can never have any practical application." Within a few weeks, I found out the reason for Rutherford's passion.

I had met Leo Szilard many years before in Budapest. In London, he came to me and told me he had worked with the recently discovered neutrons. Since they have no charge, they can approach a nucleus, which no other nucleus can do. Thus, you might cause reactions in that nucleus that produces two neutrons. If that could be done, then nuclear energy could be used on a big scale. He had been to see Rutherford, and Rutherford threw him out. Rutherford did not calm down in the next few weeks. Neither did Szilard. He continued to work and to think of this possibility, four years before fission was discovered.

In the meantime, I got an invitation to come to the United States to work with a very wonderful Russian who had escaped from the Soviet Union, George Gamow. I worked at George Washington University, working out consequences of the new atomic theory, and had a really wonderful time. In many ways, that should have been the end of my career. Except, in January 1939, we had our usual interesting annual conference at George Washington University, to which George Gamow invited me along, and Szilard arrived with the news about the discovery of fission. It was big news.

We had a busy conference. And my wife and I got very tired by the end of the conference. But no sooner did we start to relax -- let's say 15 minutes after -- there was a telephone call, and my friend Leo Szilard was on the other end. "I am at the Union Station, come and get me." Well, Szilard was perhaps the last -- or one of the last -- men who had a great influence on me. That is, a great positive influence. No one could have had a greater influence on me than Hitler, who made it entirely clear to me that one could not ignore politics, and very particularly one could not ignore the worst evils in politics. What Szilard wanted was to say, "Here is what I have been waiting for! Here is what I have told you in London years ago: fission. Maybe in fission, when a big nucleus -- the biggest, uranium -- splits into two pieces, perhaps this fission, caused by one neutron, will emit two neutrons and then nuclear explosions will become possible." It made sense. And a few weeks later, there was Szilard on the phone calling in from New York. "I have found the neutrons!"
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By that time, I knew that what Rutherford called nonsense was actually a hard reality. And the possibility that Hitler would get there first was entirely reality, because fission actually was discovered in Berlin in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Szilard was the most persistent in pursuing this subject. Others tried and there was no interest in our government, at least in the lower circles any one of us could get to. But Szilard had imagination and -- as far as I ever could discover -- no inhibitions.

That summer, I was teaching at Columbia and Szilard came to me one day. "Can you drive me out to the end of Long Island to see Einstein?" You know, Szilard was very ingenious and could do anything except drive a car. And furthermore, he had false hopes that I would be a good driver. At any rate, I got him to Einstein. He invited us to a cup of tea, and Szilard took a letter out of his pocket and Einstein read it carefully and signed it, and made one relevant remark. "This is the first time," he said, "we would get energy directly from the atomic nucleus, rather than from the sun, which got it from the atomic nucleus." He handed the letter back to Szilard, and that was the second of August. The rest is known to everybody. I had played my essential role as Szilard's chauffeur. Szilard gave the letter to an acquaintance of his who knew the President -- who knew Roosevelt. The letter was signed on the second of August, a little more than four weeks before Hitler invaded Poland. The delivery of the letter was slow, but it got there, circumventing any interference by secretaries. And FDR saw it, end of October, after Hitler and Stalin defeated -- and divided between themselves -- Poland. The letter said the science is there. Nuclear explosives can be made, and the Germans were the first to know about it, they discovered it. I cannot think of a time where such a letter could have made more of an impact on Roosevelt than the time when he actually got it. He immediately issued orders and we got going.
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