David Lappa comments from Australia on the death of the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb”

“I always look upon him as a passionate patriotic citizen of the country with a Hungarian accent,” Sewell said. “Boy, he (Teller) was American through and through. He certainly wanted to see the American ideals passed on as much as possible.”

[Edward Teller, the ‘father of the H-bomb’ has died aged 95]

YOU would be astounded to read the transcripts of the Non-Proliferation hearings in the US senate in the 1950s. If you never thought US senators grovel, you must read their exchanges with Edward Teller.

I worked at Lawrence Livermore Lab for twenty years. I sometimes rode the elevator with Teller. I attended his talks. I rode up a lift with him about an hour after Arafat shook Rabin’s reluctant hand on the White House lawn, almost exactly 10 years ago. I nearly bit my tongue off, refraining from asking him what he thought about it. He didn’t look happy that day.

Presumably, Teller is a citizen of Israel; but, there’s no way he could have kept his ultra-high security clearance with dual citizenship. Finessed, I suppose, like so many other dual loyalty cases in the US. Teller has family in Israel, and I suspect he had more than a little to do with Israel’s successful and clandestine nuclear weapons program.

Teller was reputedly ultra-brilliant, though he never impressed me so. I found him to be typically naïve; unwilling to accept that other, less technical people, were entitled to their skepticism of his claims. His attitude (borne by so many in my field) is what killed nuclear power in the US. I also found him sometimes exhibiting tunnel vision; as when I heard him decrying the ban on DDT because of all the deaths mosquitoes would cause. Apparently, he had not conception that other pesticides or methods could be used against mossies. I doubt he worried much over bald eagles. Bald egos, certainly.

 AS for his “Star Wars” role, the best story about him from my days at “the Lab” date from when Teller’s outlandish claim — that the entire US could be defended by a single, desk-sized orbiting weapons system — was held up to ridicule. It got around that a new unit had been devised; a unit of optimism, called the teller. The problem was, like the farad, one teller was so huge that ordinary events required only nanotellers or picotellers.

Teller hand-picked most of the Lab’s early key scientists. Then he left the seat of power to work ex officio. His legacy remains in a place where every sort of iconoclasm is abetted, except disdain for Israel. That will get you fired. I saw it happen to many good employees.

Perhaps most intriguing is the manner in which Teller gained so much control at Livermore. He was junior to the much more powerful (and superior physicist) Ernest Lawrence, after whom not one, but two US national laboratories are named. (One at Berkeley, the other at Livermore.)

Lawrence died young and, in my view, in mysterious circumstances just after a trip to Europe. I believe it possible he was assassinated; paving the way for Teller to take over and shape the Livermore Lab.

Lawrence is claimed to have stolen the idea for his Nobel prize-winning invention, the cyclotron, from — whom else? — Jewish physicist Leo Szilard. The claim seems ludicrous, and the US government certainly enshrined Lawrence’s memory well. But, we can expect, in time, Lawrence to succumb to disrepute, while Szilard’s legacy is growing, day by long, long day.

David Lappa

David Irving comments:

AS I have related elsewhere on this website (“Heisenberg was right!“), I had the distinction of interviewing Edward Teller for the Munich edition of Penthouse magazine late in 1980. My friend Rolf Hochhuth set up that little mission for me. It was a hilarious interview, not without its moments of black humour.

A few years later I spoke about the interview during one of my speeches to the DVU in Passau. My diary for August 9, 1985 reminds me: “The speech went down well, particularly the references to [Werner] Heisenberg and Edward Teller, and how Heisenberg had described the scientists who had left Germany as the Abschaum, perhaps a slight exaggeration (he called them ‘second class’), but the applause was deafening.”

One day I will publish the tape transcript of my Teller interview, if I can retrieve it from my files, which the Government trustee seized in May 2002. It was necessarily conducted in German. The version subsequently published by Penthouse was, ahem, different.

Nearly twenty years later, I saw the old man again. My diary for October 25, 1999 — I was visiting Stanford University to research in their archives — recalls:

Bumped into Edward Teller outside the reading room; I thought it was him, remarked to Joe that he looked like Edward Teller, and Joe said: That was the name on his tag. I hurried back, but the professor had gone. He was father of the hydrogen bomb, I explained to Joe, who had never heard the name, I interviewed T. here, at this building fifteen years or so ago for Penthouse.

I wrote to one student who inquired about the atomic bomb in 1999 (“Did Heisenberg want to build The Bomb?”)

If you really want to shine in your class, write to Edward Teller, the “father of the Hydrogen Bomb”, at Stanford and ask him the same question: he knew Heisenberg really well. I know that Teller is still there because when I was at Stanford a couple of weeks ago, researching in their manuscript archives, I bumped into him: a bit more bent, a bit grumpier, but still the same old gentleman I once interviewed — for Penthouse!

Time flies. The pendulum swings, the escapement clicks; tick… tock…and … Edward Teller is gone.