Hydrogen Bomb

Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede, January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-born American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” even though he did not care for the title.[1]
Teller emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, and was an early member of the Manhattan Project charged with developing the first atomic bombs. During this time he made a serious push to develop the first fusion-based weapons as well, but these were deferred until after World War II. After his controversial testimony in the security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller was ostracized by much of the scientific community. He continued to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. He was a co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and was both its director and associate director for many years.
In his later years he became especially known for his advocacy of controversial technological solutions to both military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using thermonuclear explosives. He was a vigorous advocate of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Over the course of his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality, and is considered one of the inspirations for the character Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 movie of the same name.
Teller was born in Budapest, Hungary (then Austria-Hungary) into a Jewish family. When he was very young, his grandfather told his mother not to be too unhappy that he was apparently an idiot, because he hadn’t spoken by the age of three. Teller had no interest in speaking because his father spoke Hungarian and very poor German, and his mother spoke German and very poor Hungarian. As a result, he decided that they didn’t know what they were talking about. He became instead very interested in numbers, and would calculate in his head large numbers, such as the number of seconds in a year.[2]
He left Hungary in 1926 (partly due to the numerus clausus rule under Horthy’s regime). The political climate and revolutions in Hungary during his youth instilled a lingering animosity for both Communism and Fascism in Teller.[3] When he was a young student, his right foot was severed in a streetcar accident in Munich, requiring him to wear a prosthetic foot and leaving him with a life-long limp. Teller graduated in chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe and received his Ph.D. in physics under Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. Teller’s Ph.D. dissertation dealt with one of the first accurate quantum mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecular ion. In 1930 he befriended Russian physicists George Gamow and Lev Landau. Teller’s life-long friendship with a Czech physicist, George Placzek, was very important for Teller’s scientific and philosophical development. It was Placzek who arranged a summer stay in Rome with Enrico Fermi for young Teller, thus orienting his scientific career in nuclear physics.[4]
Teller spent two years at the University of Göttingen, and left in 1933 through the aid of the International Rescue Committee. He went briefly to England, and moved for a year to Copenhagen, where he worked under Niels Bohr. In February 1934, he married Augusta Maria “Mici” (pronounced “Mitzi”) Harkanyi, the sister of a longtime friend.[citation needed]
In 1935, thanks to George Gamow’s incentive, Teller was invited to the United States to become a Professor of Physics at George Washington University (GWU), where he worked with Gamow until 1941. Prior to the discovery of fission in 1939, Teller was engaged as a theoretical physicist, working in the fields of quantum, molecular, and nuclear physics. In 1941, after becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States, his interest turned to the use of nuclear energy, both fusion and fission.[citation needed]

Teller in his youth
At GWU, Teller predicted the Jahn–Teller effect (1937), which distorts molecules in certain situations; this affects the chemical reactions of metals, and in particular the coloration of certain metallic dyes. Teller and Hermann Arthur Jahn analyzed it as a piece of purely mathematical physics. In collaboration with Brunauer and Emmet, Teller also made an important contribution to surface physics and chemistry: the so-called Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) isotherm.[citation needed]
When World War II began, Teller wanted to contribute to the war effort. On the advice of the well-known Caltech aerodynamicist and fellow Hungarian émigré Theodore von Kármán, Teller collaborated with his friend Hans Bethe in developing a theory of shock-wave propagation. In later years, their explanation of the behavior of the gas behind such a wave proved valuable to scientists who were studying missile re-entry.
Manhattan Project

In 1942, Teller was invited to be part of Robert Oppenheimer’s summer planning seminar at the University of California, Berkeley for the origins of the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to develop the first nuclear weapons. A few weeks earlier, Teller had been meeting with his friend and colleague Enrico Fermi about the prospects of atomic warfare, and Fermi had nonchalantly suggested that perhaps a weapon based on nuclear fission could be used to set off an even larger nuclear fusion reaction. Even though he initially explained to Fermi why he thought the idea would not work, Teller was fascinated by the possibility and was quickly bored with the idea of “just” an atomic bomb (even though this was not yet anywhere near completion). At the Berkeley session, Teller diverted discussion from the fission weapon to the possibility of a fusion weapon—what he called the “Super” (an early version of what was later known as a hydrogen bomb).
On December 6, 1941, the United States had begun development of the atomic bomb, under the supervision of Arthur Compton, chairman of the University of Chicago physics department, who coordinated uranium research with Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, and University of California, Berkeley. Eventually Compton transferred the Columbia and Princeton scientists to the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago, and Enrico Fermi moved in at the end of April 1942 and the construction of Chicago Pile 1 began. Teller was left behind at first, but then called to Chicago two months later. In early 1943, the Los Alamos laboratory was built to design an atomic bomb under the supervision of Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Teller moved there in April 1943.

Teller became part of the Theoretical Physics division at the then-secret Los Alamos laboratory during the war, and continued to push his ideas for a fusion weapon even though it had been put on a low priority during the war (as the creation of a fission weapon was proving to be difficult enough by itself). Because of his interest in the H-bomb, and his frustration at having been passed over for director of the theoretical division (the job was instead given to Hans Bethe), Teller refused to engage in the calculations for the implosion mechanism of the fission bomb. This caused tensions with other researchers, as additional scientists had to be employed to do that work—including Klaus Fuchs, who was later revealed to be a Soviet spy.[8] Apparently, Teller managed to also irk his neighbors by playing the piano late in the night. However, Teller made valuable contributions to bomb research, especially in the elucidation of the implosion mechanism.
In 1946, Teller participated in a conference in which the properties of thermonuclear fuels such as deuterium and the possible design of a hydrogen bomb were discussed. It was concluded that Teller’s assessment of a hydrogen bomb had been too favourable, and that both the quantity of deuterium needed, as well as the radiation losses during deuterium burning, would shed doubt on its workability. Addition of expensive tritium to the thermonuclear mixture would likely lower its ignition temperature, but even so, nobody knew at that time how much tritium would be needed, and whether even tritium addition would encourage heat propagation. At the end of the conference, in spite of opposition by some members such as Robert Serber, Teller submitted an unduly optimistic report in which he said that a hydrogen bomb was feasible, and that further work should be encouraged on its development. Fuchs had also participated in this conference, and transmitted this information to Moscow. 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 retard their progress on it.
In 1946, Teller left Los Alamos to return to the University of Chicago as a professor and close associate of Enrico Fermi and Maria Mayer. He was now known as the father of the hydrogen bomb.

Hydrogen Bomb

The Teller-Ulam design kept the fission and fusion fuel physically separated from one another, and used radiation from the primary device “reflected” off the surrounding casing to compress the secondary.
Following the Soviet Union’s first test detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949, President Truman announced a crash development program for a hydrogen bomb. Teller returned to Los Alamos in 1950 to work on the project. He insisted on involving more theorists, since he knew that Klaus Fuchs could provide the Soviets with valuable ideas; it was Fuchs who invented compression by means of radiation implosion back in 1946. However many of Teller’s prominent colleagues, like Bethe 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. However Soviet scientists who had worked on their own hydrogen bomb have claimed that they developed it independently.
In 1950, calculations by the Polish mathematician Stanisław Ulam and his collaborator Cornelius Everett, along with confirmations by Fermi, had shown that not only was Teller’s earlier estimate of the quantity of tritium needed for the H-bomb a low one, but that even with higher amounts of tritium, the energy loss in the fusion process would be too great to enable the fusion reaction to propagate. However, in 1951, in the joint report by Ulam and Teller of March 1951, “Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors”, an innovative idea emerged, and it was developed into the first workable design for a megaton-range H-bomb. The exact contribution provided respectively from Ulam and Teller to what became known as the Teller–Ulam design is not definitively known in the public domain, and the exact contributions of each and how the final idea was arrived upon has been a point of dispute in both public and classified discussions since the early 1950s.
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 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.’”
The issue is controversial. Bethe considered Teller’s contribution to the invention of the H-bomb a true innovation as early as 1952, and referred to his work as a “stroke of genius” in 1954.[18] 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.[19] Ulam himself claimed that Teller only produced a “more generalized” version of Ulam’s original design.
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 radiation produced by the fission bomb to first compress the fusion fuel 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 radiation from the primary would do the job much earlier and more efficiently. Some members of the laboratory (J. Carson Mark in particular) later expressed that the idea to use the radiation would have eventually occurred to anyone working on the physical processes involved, and that the obvious reason why Teller thought of radiation right away was because he was already working on the “Greenhouse” tests for the spring of 1951, in which the effect of the energy from a fission bomb on a mixture of deuterium and tritium was going to be investigated
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 USA and the USSR had developed multi-megaton weapons. Even Oppenheimer, who was originally opposed to the project, called the idea “technically sweet.”

The 10.4 Mt “Ivy Mike” shot of 1952 appeared to vindicate Teller’s long-time advocacy for the hydrogen bomb.
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 Livermore branch of the University of California Radiation Laboratory, which had been created largely through his urging. After the detonation of “Ivy Mike”, the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the Teller–Ulam configuration, on November 1, 1952, Teller became known in the press as the “father of the hydrogen bomb.” Teller himself refrained from attending the test—he claimed not to feel welcome at the Pacific Proving Grounds—and instead saw its results on a seismograph in the basement of a hall in Berkeley.
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 decipher the new American design. However, this was later denied by the Soviet bomb researchers.[23] 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).
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.
Teller was known for getting engrossed in projects which were theoretically interesting but practically unfeasible (the classic “Super” was one such project.) 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.”[26]
During the Manhattan Project, Teller also advocated the development of a bomb using uranium hydride, which many of his fellow theorists said would be unlikely to work. At Livermore, Teller continued work on the hydride bomb, and the result was a dud. 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.” Fermi once said that Teller was the only monomaniac he knew who had several manias.
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 fusion boosting in 1945, which is essential for miniaturization and reliability and is used in all of today’s nuclear weapons.
World War III Article