‘I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller… I think he is an enemy of humanity.’ With this uncompromising assessment of his fellow physicist, the Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi expressed a view that has found many an echo throughout the last five decades.
There are several reasons to regard Edward Teller as, in Rabi’s words, ‘a danger to all that is important’. First and foremost, he was ‘the father of the H-bomb’, the man who obsessively and single-mindedly overcame all the form- idable barriers — intellectual, technical, political and moral — in the way of creating the most terrifying weapon the world has ever known, a weapon so awe-inspiringly devastating that its use in combat is still now, 60 years after its invention, almost inconceivable. Why would anybody — other than ‘an enemy of humanity’ — want to design a weapon several hundred times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Secondly, Teller was the man who testified against his erstwhile friend and colleague, Robert Oppenheimer, when Oppenheimer, in 1954, less than ten years after leading the project to design and build the world’s first atom bomb, was accused of being at worst a Soviet agent and at best a security risk. While almost all the other scientists who had worked with Oppenheimer testified to his loyalty, his good character and his inspiring leadership, Teller took the stand to say that he would feel ‘more secure’ if Oppenheimer had no influence on public affairs and that it would be wiser not to grant Oppenheimer access to secret documents. When Oppenheimer was subsequently removed from all policy-making and advisory committees and had his security clearance taken away from him, it was widely felt that Teller’s testimony had been a decisive factor.
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