Edward Teller

Edward Teller (1908-2003), Hungarian-born American physicist, known for his work on the hydrogen bomb. Teller became a controversial figure among nuclear scientists after he testified against physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the 1950s and when he championed a ballistic missile defense system in the 1980s.

Teller was born in Budapest, and was educated in Germany at the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe and at the University of Munich. He obtained his doctorate in 1930 at the University of Leipzig, studying under German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Teller then secured a faculty position at the University of Göttingen, but he left Germany after the Nazis came to power, knowing that as a Jew he would face their anti-Semitic policies.

Teller lived briefly in Copenhagen, Denmark, and London, England, and then moved to the United States where in 1935 he accepted a position as a professor of physics at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In 1939, two years before he became an American citizen, Teller joined fellow Hungarian-refugee scientists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner on a visit to Albert Einstein in the hope of enlisting Einstein’s help in warning the U.S. government about Nazi Germany’s potential development of an atomic bomb. In 1942 Teller joined the U.S. atomic bomb project known as the Manhattan Project.

Following the successful development of the atomic bomb in 1945, Teller pushed for a new project to test a hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer, who had been the scientific director of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, opposed the idea, partly on the grounds that such a powerful weapon, about 500 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, was not needed. Teller won the necessary backing for his project, however, and he became the principal architect of the hydrogen bomb, which was first tested in 1952. The same year he became professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and was instrumental in establishing the university's radiation laboratory (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). From 1958 to 1960, he was the laboratory’s director. In 1975 he retired from teaching and was named director emeritus of the Livermore lab.

During the 1950s Teller alienated many of the nuclear scientists he had worked with on the Manhattan Project when he testified against Oppenheimer at a security hearing. Many scientists clashed again with Teller during the 1980s when he advocated building a missile defense system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, which many in the scientific community believed was unworkable.