Edward Teller
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Edward Teller (
Born in
Teller made contributions to
Teller continued to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for
Early life and work
Ede Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family. His parents were Ilona (née Deutsch),[3][4] a pianist, and Max Teller, an attorney.[5] He attended the Minta Gymnasium in Budapest.[6] Teller was an agnostic. "Religion was not an issue in my family", he later wrote, "indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years."[7] Teller was a late talker, but he became very interested in numbers and for fun calculated large numbers in his head.[8]
Teller left Hungary for Germany in 1926, partly due to the discriminatory numerus clausus rule under Miklós Horthy's regime. The political climate and revolutions in Hungary during his youth instilled a lingering animosity toward Communism and Fascism.[9]
From 1926 to 1928, Teller studied mathematics and chemistry at the
Teller then attended the
In 1929, Teller transferred to the
Mici had been a student in
When
Manhattan Project
Los Alamos Laboratory
In 1942, Teller was invited to be part of
Teller became part of the Theoretical (T) Division.
A special group was established under Teller in March 1944 to investigate the mathematics of an
Teller made valuable contributions to bomb research, especially in the elucidation of the implosion mechanism. He was the first to propose the
Decision to drop the bombs
In the days before and after the first demonstration of a nuclear weapon (the
Teller therefore penned a letter in response to Szilard that read:
I am not really convinced of your objections. I do not feel that there is any chance to outlaw any one weapon. If we have a slim chance of survival, it lies in the possibility to get rid of wars. The more decisive a weapon is the more surely it will be used in any real conflict and no agreements will help. Our only hope is in getting the facts of our results before the people. This might help to convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat-use might even be the best thing.[53]
On reflection on this letter years later when he was writing his memoirs, Teller wrote:
First, Szilard was right. As scientists who worked on producing the bomb, we bore a special responsibility. Second, Oppenheimer was right. We did not know enough about the political situation to have a valid opinion. Third, what we should have done but failed to do was to work out the technical changes required for demonstrating the bomb [very high] over Tokyo and submit that information to President Truman.[54]
Unknown to Teller at the time, four of his colleagues were solicited by the then secret May to June 1945 Interim Committee. It is this organization which ultimately decided on how the new weapons should initially be used. The committee's four-member Scientific Panel was led by Oppenheimer, and concluded immediate military use on Japan was the best option:
The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender ... Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use ... We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.[55]
Teller later learned of Oppenheimer's solicitation and his role in the Interim Committee's decision to drop the bombs, having secretly endorsed an immediate military use of the new weapons. This was contrary to the impression that Teller had received when he had personally asked Oppenheimer about the Szilard petition: that the nation's fate should be left to the sensible politicians in Washington. Following Teller's discovery of this, his relationship with his advisor began to deteriorate.[52]
In 1990, the historian Barton Bernstein argued that it is an "unconvincing claim" by Teller that he was a "covert dissenter" to the use of the bomb.[56] In his 2001 Memoirs, Teller claims that he did lobby Oppenheimer, but that Oppenheimer had convinced him that he should take no action and that the scientists should leave military questions in the hands of the military; Teller claims he was not aware that Oppenheimer and other scientists were being consulted as to the actual use of the weapon and implies that Oppenheimer was being hypocritical.[57]
Hydrogen bomb
Despite an offer from Norris Bradbury, who had replaced Oppenheimer as the director of Los Alamos in November 1945 to become the head of the Theoretical (T) Division, Teller left Los Alamos on February 1, 1946, to return to the University of Chicago as a professor and close associate of Fermi and Maria Goeppert Mayer.[58] Goepper-Mayer's work on the internal structure of the elements would earn her the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.[59]
On April 18–20, 1946, Teller participated in a conference at Los Alamos to review the wartime work on the Super. The properties of thermonuclear fuels such as
At the end of the conference, in spite of opposition by some members such as Robert Serber, Teller submitted an optimistic report in which he said that a hydrogen bomb was feasible, and that further work should be encouraged on its development. Fuchs also participated in this conference, and transmitted this information to Moscow. With John von Neumann, he contributed an idea of using implosion to ignite the Super. The model of Teller's "classical Super" was so uncertain that Oppenheimer would later say that he wished the Russians were building their own hydrogen bomb based on that design, so that it would almost certainly delay their progress on it.[60]
By 1949,
Teller returned to Los Alamos in 1950 to work on the project. He insisted on involving more theorists, but many of Teller's prominent colleagues, like Fermi and Oppenheimer, were sure that the project of the H-bomb was technically infeasible and politically undesirable. None of the available designs were yet workable.[63] However, Soviet scientists who had worked on their own hydrogen bomb have claimed that they developed it independently.[64]
In 1950, calculations by the Polish mathematician
In an interview with Scientific American from 1999, Teller told the reporter:
I contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and had 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."[9]
The issue is controversial. Bethe considered Teller's contribution to the invention of the H-bomb a true innovation as early as 1952,[66] and referred to his work as a "stroke of genius" in 1954.[67] In both cases, however, Bethe emphasized Teller's role as a way of stressing that the development of the H-bomb could not have been hastened by additional support or funding, and Teller greatly disagreed with Bethe's assessment. Other scientists (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.[68] Ulam himself claimed that Teller only produced a "more generalized" version of Ulam's original design.[69]
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 X-rays produced by the fission bomb to first compress the fusion fuel (by a process known as "radiation implosion") before igniting it. Ulam's idea seems to have been to use mechanical shock from the primary to encourage fusion in the secondary, while Teller quickly realized that X-rays from the primary would do the job much more symmetrically. Some members of the laboratory (J. Carson Mark in particular) later expressed the opinion that the idea to use the X-rays would have eventually occurred to anyone working on the physical processes involved, and that the obvious reason why Teller thought of it right away was because he was already working on the "Greenhouse" tests for the spring of 1951, in which the effect of X-rays from a fission bomb on a mixture of deuterium and tritium was going to be investigated.[65]
Priscilla Johnson McMillan in her book The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the Birth of the Modern Arms Race, writes that Teller "concealed the role" of Ulam, and that only "radiation implosion" was Teller's idea. Teller even refused to sign the patent application, because it would need Ulam's signature. Thomas Powers writes that "of course the bomb designers all knew the truth, and many considered Teller the lowest, most contemptible kind of offender in the world of science, a stealer of credit".[70]
Whatever the actual components of the so-called Teller–Ulam design and the respective contributions of those who worked on it, after it was proposed it was immediately seen by the scientists working on the project as the answer which had been so long sought. Those who previously had doubted whether a fission-fusion bomb would be feasible at all were converted into believing that it was only a matter of time before both the US and the USSR had developed multi-megaton weapons. Even Oppenheimer, who was originally opposed to the project, called the idea "technically sweet".[71]
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 of a thorny personality likely played a role in this). In 1952 he left Los Alamos and joined the newly established
There was an opinion that by analyzing the fallout from this test, the Soviets (led in their H-bomb work by Andrei Sakharov) could have deciphered the new American design. However, this was later denied by the Soviet bomb researchers.[73] 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).[64]
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 in order to "soothe ruffled feelings", and claimed full credit for the invention.[74][75]
Teller was known for getting engrossed in projects which were theoretically interesting but practically infeasible (the classic "Super" was one such project.)[37] About his work on the hydrogen bomb, Bethe said:
Nobody will blame 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.[76]
During the Manhattan Project, Teller advocated the development of a bomb using uranium hydride, which many of his fellow theorists said would be unlikely to work.[77] At Livermore, Teller continued work on the hydride bomb, and the result was a dud.[78] 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."[79] Fermi once said that Teller was the only monomaniac he knew who had several manias.[80]
Carey Sublette of Nuclear Weapon Archive argues that Ulam came up with the radiation implosion compression design of thermonuclear weapons, but that on the other hand Teller has gotten little credit for being the first to propose
Oppenheimer controversy
Teller became controversial in 1954 when he testified against Oppenheimer at
Asked at the hearing by Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) attorney Roger Robb whether he was planning "to suggest that Dr. Oppenheimer is disloyal to the United States", Teller replied that:
I do not want to suggest anything of the kind. I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and a very complicated person, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my part if I would try in any way to analyze his motives. But I have always assumed, and I now assume that he is loyal to the United States. I believe this, and I shall believe it until I see very conclusive proof to the opposite.[83]
He was immediately asked whether he believed that Oppenheimer was a "security risk", to which he testified:
In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.[67]
Teller also testified that Oppenheimer's opinion about the thermonuclear program seemed to be based more on the scientific feasibility of the weapon than anything else. He additionally testified that Oppenheimer's direction of Los Alamos was "a very outstanding achievement" both as a scientist and an administrator, lauding his "very quick mind" and that he made "just a most wonderful and excellent director".[67]
After this, however, he detailed ways in which he felt that Oppenheimer had hindered his efforts towards an active thermonuclear development program, and at length criticized Oppenheimer's decisions not to invest more work onto the question at different points in his career, saying: "If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance."[67]
By recasting a difference of judgment over the merits of the early work on the hydrogen bomb project into a matter of a security risk, Teller effectively damned Oppenheimer in a field where security was necessarily of paramount concern. Teller's testimony thereby rendered Oppenheimer vulnerable to charges by a Congressional aide that he was a Soviet spy, which resulted in the destruction of Oppenheimer's career.[84]
Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked after the hearings. Most of Teller's former colleagues disapproved of his testimony and he was ostracized by much of the scientific community.[82] After the fact, Teller consistently denied that he was intending to damn Oppenheimer, and even claimed that he was attempting to exonerate him. However, documentary evidence has suggested that this was likely not the case. Six days before the testimony, Teller met with an AEC liaison officer and suggested "deepening the charges" in his testimony.[85]
Teller always insisted that his testimony had not significantly harmed Oppenheimer. In 2002, Teller contended that Oppenheimer was "not destroyed" by the security hearing but "no longer asked to assist in policy matters". He claimed his words were an overreaction, because he had only just learned of Oppenheimer's failure to immediately report an approach by Haakon Chevalier, who had approached Oppenheimer to help the Russians. Teller said that, in hindsight, he would have responded differently.[82]
Historian
US government work and political advocacy
After the Oppenheimer controversy, Teller became ostracized by much of the scientific community, but was still quite welcome in the government and military science circles. Along with his traditional advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program, he had helped to develop
Teller promoted increased defense spending to counter the perceived Soviet missile threat. He was a signatory to the 1958 report by the military sub-panel of the Rockefeller Brothers funded Special Studies Project, which called for a $3 billion annual increase in America's military budget.[89]
In 1956 he attended the Project Nobska anti-submarine warfare conference, where discussion ranged from oceanography to nuclear weapons. In the course of discussing a small nuclear warhead for the Mark 45 torpedo, he started a discussion on the possibility of developing a physically small one-megaton nuclear warhead for the Polaris missile. His counterpart in the discussion, J. Carson Mark from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, at first insisted it could not be done. However, Dr. Mark eventually stated that a half-megaton warhead of small enough size could be developed. This yield, roughly thirty times that of the Hiroshima bomb, was enough for Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke, who was present in person, and Navy strategic missile development shifted from Jupiter to Polaris by the end of the year.[90]
He was Director of the
Teller established the
Global climate change
Teller was one of the first prominent people to raise the danger of
In 1959, at a symposium organised by the
I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. ... And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. ... Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. ... Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect. ... It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.
Non-military uses of nuclear explosions
Teller was one of the strongest and best-known advocates for investigating
Other scientists criticized the project as being potentially unsafe for the local wildlife and the
A related experiment which also had Teller's endorsement was a plan to extract oil from the
Teller also proposed the use of nuclear bombs to prevent damage from powerful hurricanes. He argued that when conditions in the Atlantic Ocean are right for the formation of hurricanes, the heat generated by well-placed nuclear explosions could trigger several small hurricanes, rather than waiting for nature to build one large one.[103]
Nuclear technology and Israel
For some twenty years, Teller advised Israel on nuclear matters in general, and on the building of a hydrogen bomb in particular.[104] In 1952, Teller and Oppenheimer had a long meeting with David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv, telling him that the best way to accumulate plutonium was to burn natural uranium in a nuclear reactor. Starting in 1964, a connection between Teller and Israel was made by the physicist Yuval Ne'eman, who had similar political views. Between 1964 and 1967, Teller visited Israel six times, lecturing at Tel Aviv University, and advising the chiefs of Israel's scientific-security circle as well as prime ministers and cabinet members.[105]
In 1967 when the Israeli nuclear program was nearing completion, Teller informed Neeman that he was going to tell the
In the 1980s, Teller again visited Israel to advise the
Three Mile Island
Teller had a heart attack in 1979, and blamed it on Jane Fonda, who had starred in The China Syndrome, which depicted a fictional reactor accident and was released less than two weeks before the Three Mile Island accident. She spoke out against nuclear power while promoting the film. After the accident, Teller acted quickly to lobby in defence of nuclear energy, testifying to its safety and reliability, and soon after one flurry of activity suffered the attack. He signed a two-page-spread ad in the July 31, 1979, issue of The Washington Post with the headline "I was the only victim of Three-Mile Island".[108] It opened with:
On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.[109]
Strategic Defense Initiative
In the 1980s, Teller began a strong campaign for what was later called the
Scandal erupted when Teller (and his associate Lowell Wood) were accused of deliberately overselling the program and perhaps encouraging the dismissal of a laboratory director (Roy Woodruff) who had attempted to correct the error.[111] His claims led to a joke which circulated in the scientific community, that a new unit of unfounded optimism was designated as the teller; one teller was so large that most events had to be measured in nanotellers or picotellers.[112]
Many prominent scientists argued that the system was futile. Hans Bethe, along with IBM physicist Richard Garwin and Cornell University colleague Kurt Gottfried, wrote an article in Scientific American which analyzed the system and concluded that any putative enemy could disable such a system by the use of suitable decoys that would cost a very small fraction of the SDI program.[113]
In 1987 Teller published a book entitled Better a Shield than a Sword, which supported
Asteroid impact avoidance
Following the 1994
Death and legacy
Teller died in Stanford, California on September 9, 2003, at the age of 95.[37] He had suffered a stroke two days before and had long been experiencing a number of conditions related to his advanced age.[119]
Teller's vigorous advocacy for strength through nuclear weapons, especially when so many of his wartime colleagues later expressed regret about the arms race, made him an easy target for the "
Nobel Prize winning physicist
In 1981, Teller became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.[121] A wish for his 100th birthday, made around the time of his 90th, was for Lawrence Livermore's scientists to give him "excellent predictions—calculations and experiments—about the interiors of the planets".[19]
In 1986, he was awarded the
His final paper, published posthumously, advocated the construction of a prototype liquid fluoride thorium reactor.[130][131] The genesis and impetus for this last paper was recounted by the co-author Ralph Moir in 2007.[132]
He was portrayed by David Suchet in the 1980 TV miniseries Oppenheimer and by Benny Safdie in the 2023 biopic film Oppenheimer.[133]
Bibliography
- Our Nuclear Future; Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities (1958), with Albert L. Latter as co-author[134]
- Basic Concepts of Physics (1960)
- The Legacy of Hiroshima (1962), with Allen Brown[135][136]
- The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosions (1968)
- Energy from Heaven and Earth (1979)
- The Pursuit of Simplicity (1980)
- Better a Shield Than a Sword: Perspectives on Defense and Technology (1987)[137]
- Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics (1991), with Wendy Teller and Wilson Talley
- Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing. 2001 – via Internet Archive., with Judith Shoolery[140]
References
Citations
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Alternate source video (uploaded to Web of Stories YouTube channel on September 27, 2017) - ^ Edward Teller Facts, quote:
"Leaving Hungary because of anti-Semitism, Teller went to Germany to study chemistry and mathematics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology from 1926 to 1928. A lecture he heard by Herman Mark on the new science of molecular spectroscopy made a lasting impression on him: "He [Mark] made it clear that new ideas in physics had changed chemistry into an important part of the forefront of physics." - ^ Edward Teller – Wave-particle duality sparked a fascination with physics (segment 16 of 147), June 1996 interview with John H. Nuckolls, former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (posted on 24 January 2008)
Alternate source video (uploaded to Web of Stories YouTube channel on Sep 27, 2017)
Quote:
"This theory [of polymer chemistry, and its relation to quantum physics] managed to make in me a big change from an interest in mathematics to an interest in physics." - ^ Edward Teller – Permission to become a physicist (segment 17 of 147), June 1996 interview with John H. Nuckolls, former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (posted on January 24, 2008)
Alternate source video (uploaded to Web of Stories YouTube channel on September 27, 2017) - ^ Edward Teller – Jumping off the moving train (segment 20 of 147), June 1996 interview with John H. Nuckolls, former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (posted on January 24, 2008) (uploaded to Web of Stories YouTube channel on September 27, 2017)
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- ^ O'Neill 1994, pp. 97, 111.
- ^ Broad 1992, p. 48.
- ^ Chance, Norman. "Project Chariot: The Nuclear Legacy of Cape Thompson, Alaska Norman Chance – Part 2". University of Connecticut. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
- ^ Loreto, Frank (April 26, 2002). "Review of Nuclear Dynamite". CM. Vol. 8, no. 17. University of Manitoba. Archived from the original on October 15, 2002.
- ^ Clearwater, John (1998). "Canadian Nuclear Weapons". Dundurn Press (Toronto). Archived from the original on July 18, 2011. Retrieved January 30, 2011.
- ^ "Nuke Hurricanes, Teller Proposes". The Orlando Sentinel. June 9, 1990. Retrieved July 8, 2021.
- ^ Karpin 2005, pp. 289–293.
- ^ Gábor Palló (2000). "The Hungarian Phenomenon in Israeli Science" (PDF). Bull. Hist. Chem. 25 (1): 35–42. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 9, 2022. Retrieved December 11, 2012.
- ^ a b Cohen 1998, pp. 297–300.
- ^ UPI (December 6, 1982). "Edward Teller in Israel To Advise on a Reactor". The New York Times. Retrieved December 11, 2012.
- ^ Goodchild 2004, p. 327.
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- ^ Gwynne, Peter (September 21, 1987). "Teller on SDI, Competitiveness". The Scientist.
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- ^ a b Planetary defense workshop LLNL 1995
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- ^ a b "A new use for nuclear weapons: hunting rogue asteroids". Center for Public Integrity. October 16, 2013. Archived from the original on March 20, 2016.
- ^ Goodchild 2004, p. 394.
- ^ This quote has been primarily attributed to Rabi in many news sources (see, e.g., McKie, Robin (May 2, 2004). "Megaton megalomaniac". The Observer. but in a few reputable sources it has also been attributed to Hans Bethe (i.e. in Herken 2002, notes to the Epilogue.
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Sources
- Blumberg, Stanley; Panos, Louis (1990). Edward Teller: Giant of The Golden Age of Physics. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. ISBN 0684190427.
- ISBN 0671701061.
- Brown, Gerald E.; Lee, Sabine (2009). Hans Albrecht Bethe (PDF). Biographical Memoirs. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences.
- ISBN 978-0231104838.
- Dash, Joan (1973). A Life of One's Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married. New York: Harper & Row. OCLC 606211.
- ISBN 978-0674016699.
- S2CID 120853984.
- ISBN 0805065881.
- OCLC 26764320.
- ISBN 0743265955.
- ISBN 0312110863.
- ISBN 0671441337.
- ISBN 068480400X.
- Teller, Edward; Shoolery, Judith L. (2001). Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing. ISBN 073820532X.
- Thorpe, Charles (2006). Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226798453.
- Ulam, S. M (1983). Adventures of a Mathematician. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. OCLC 1528346.
Further reading
- Stanley A. Blumberg and Louis G. Panos. Edward Teller : Giant of the Golden Age of Physics; a Biography (Scribner's, 1990)
- Istvan Hargittai, Judging Edward Teller: a Closer Look at One of the Most Influential Scientists of the Twentieth Century (Prometheus, 2010).
- Carl Sagan writes at length about Teller's career in chapter 16 of his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Headline, 1996), p. 268–274.
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Science and Technology Review contains 10 articles written primarily by Stephen B. Libby in 2007, about Edward Teller's life and contributions to science, to commemorate the 2008 centennial of his birth.
- Heisenberg Sabotaged the Atomic Bomb (Heisenberg hat die Atombombe sabotiert) an interview in German with Edward Teller in: Michael Schaaf: Heisenberg, Hitler und die Bombe. Gespräche mit Zeitzeugen Berlin 2001, ISBN 3928186604.
- Coughlan, Robert (September 6, 1954). "Dr. Edward Teller's Magnificent Obsession". Life. Retrieved January 29, 2019.
- Szilard, Leo. (1987) Toward a Livable World: Leo Szilard and the Crusade for Nuclear Arms Control. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262192606
External links
- 1986 Audio Interview with Edward Teller by S. L. Sanger Voices of the Manhattan Project
- Annotated Bibliography for Edward Teller from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
- "Edward Teller's Role in the Oppenheimer Hearings" interview with Richard Rhodes
- Edward Teller Biography and Interview on American Academy of Achievement
- A radio interview with Edward Teller Aired on the Lewis Burke FrumkesRadio Show in January 1988.
- The Paternity of the H-Bombs: Soviet-American Perspectives Archived June 28, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- Edward Teller tells his life story at Web of Stories (video)
- Works by Edward Teller at Project Gutenberg