Edward Teller Interview (page: 5 / 6) Father of the Hydrogen Bomb	Print Interview

So after Roosevelt read Einstein's letter and gave the go-ahead for the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb, did you become involved immediately?

Edward Teller: I didn't. I liked what I was doing much too well. My good friend Szilard was in it. So was a mutual friend, Eugene Wigner.

In the spring of 1940, I got an invitation to a Pan-American Congress -- to which I was determined not to go -- in Washington, next door. And Roosevelt was going to speak and I still was not going. But the day before his speech, Hitler invaded the Lowlands and it was very clear that the decisions in the World War were now immediately impending. And Roosevelt was going to speak about that, so I was going. The first and only time that I saw Roosevelt, and that was from a distance. He talked about the fact that the time to fly from Europe to the American continent was not so great, that small nations are not secure, neither are big ones, that the scientists may be blamed for the horrible things that are happening. "But," said Roosevelt, "I am a pacifist, and you, my friends, are pacifists, but I am telling you, if you are not going to work on the instruments of war, freedom will be lost everywhere." That was the question on my mind. And I had the impression that Roosevelt was talking to me. And of course that was stupid to think so -- me of 2,000 people -- but yes, me. Because, of a couple of thousand people present, it may have been he and I and none other who knew about the possibility of the atomic bomb. I read the letter that he read, and I knew the actions that he had already taken to start work on nuclear explosives. When he finished talking, my mind was made up. And I remember looking at my watch, he had talked 20 minutes.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime	[ Key to Success ] Vision

Not much later, I found myself in New York, and later in Chicago, where Szilard and John Wheeler were working on the nuclear reactors. Then to Los Alamos, and then the decisive work came when my good friend Johnny von Neumann visited, and the discussion between him and me led to the proposal of implosion. Pushing materials -- uranium -- together, with the power of an explosive behind it, can result in as much as double the usual density of uranium, which, for a number of not very difficult reasons, will make the production of nuclear explosives possible in the earlier future.

This, in the end, after the defeat of Hitler, led to the situation, in the spring of 1945, when it became clear that the nuclear explosives would be available. It was then that I had a letter from Leo Szilard, suggesting that the first nuclear explosive used in the war should be used for demonstration and not for actually hurting the enemy. I went with the proposal to Oppenheimer who said, definitely, "No." Unfortunately, I took his advice, partly because it involved no action. I was very sorry about having taken his advice, particularly when I learned later that he -- contrary to the statement that we physicists should stay away from such decisions -- has explicitly advocated the earliest possible use of the explosive.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime

The rest of the story is also known. Our job on the atomic bomb was not quite finished, and we had started on the fusion bomb; not based on the splitting of heavy nuclei, but on the uniting of light nuclei, hydrogen nuclei. There the work stopped, until the Soviets produced their first nuclear explosion. By that time I had worked on the possibility of the fusion bomb, initiated by the fission bomb. Some of us, and I perhaps more persistently that others, were working on that. The time had come to concentrate on that. We did, and in a short time we succeeded. It was high time, because the Soviets succeeded also, under the leadership of a very excellent and a very courageous physicist, Andrei Sakharov, whom I later met and whom I learned to like a lot.

The story of the nuclear explosions has been told and it's not my purpose to repeat it in any more detail. In 1983, Reagan asked the relevant question, "Isn't it better to save lives than to avenge them? Wouldn't it be better to develop defenses against rockets, rather than concentrate exclusively on retaliation?" That was the beginning of the concerted, organized work on the Strategic Defense Initiative. We already had been working in our Livermore Laboratory on concepts of that kind. Particularly my young friend, Lowell Wood, who is by now probably older than I was when the hydrogen bomb was completed. He looks very young to me.

I want to come back at the very end to what I have learned in life. That the future is uncertain. That indeed, what we say, what we do in each individual case, may move the whole world. And that puts an exceptional responsibility on our shoulders. We now know for a fact that there are good ways of defense against all kinds of rockets. This fact depends on Johnny von Neumann's great discovery of fast computers. They can now perform a billion individual computing acts per second, which can be increased possibly by a factor of another million. Ultimately, that is the reason why the difficult task of preventing a rocket from reaching us can be accomplished. That is why there is every reason to believe that we can hit a bullet with a bullet, and that high technology, instead of merely producing bigger bangs, can produce a defense by accuracy against the most dangerous kinds of attack. At this moment, this is the center of my interests.

Three years ago, almost four years now, a peculiar but great event took place in conductivity, building on the kind of work that I performed on photomechanics during my time in Leipzig. This phenomenon will probably be the agent that will make computing processes even faster and that might be a further powerful reason why defense can win and make the world more secure.

Edward Teller Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6