Howard Epstein
Edward Teller: The Father of the H-Bomb?

Howard Epstein | Edward Teller: The Father of the H-Bomb

- Welcome everyone who’s turned out, this evening or morning, or whatever according to where you are in the world. I hope you’ll find this as fascinating as I do. My research is for my emerging work. There, “No Genius: Hitler’s Fatal Blunders,” which I hope to complete by the end of this year, led to my last presentation for Lockdown University in August 2023. You’ll know, if only from the movie, “Oppenheimer,” that J. Robert Oppenheimer, or Oppie, as he was affectionately known, although not so much in Japan, is renowned as the father of the atomic bomb, but as the movie did not tell you, without Leo Szilard, there would’ve been no Manhattan Project for Oppenheimer to lead. My subject last year was indeed Leo Szilard, the father of the Manhattan Project. Following that, the masterful historian, the redoubtable Trudy, asked me to speak on Edward Teller, reputedly the father of the hydrogen bomb. Hydrogen bomb. How justified that reputation is, we shall be considering today. At first, I had great difficulty with Teller, having given a series of talks last year on forgotten Jewish heroes, , Leo Szilard, and Vasily Grossman, the great Russian journalist and author. I was just a loss to know how to deal with the reprobate as he will be revealed, Edward Teller. Then I got it. Teller has to be defined as an anti-hero. I’m in good company here for many things that Stanley Kubrick modelled Dr. Strangelove on Edward Teller, alternatively on Henry Kissinger, an equally difficult character who was accused by Christopher Hitchens of war crimes. Something for which Kissinger did not sue Hitchens for libel. Did not sue.

The subtitle of the movie, “Dr. Strangelove,” is how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which is of course the heaviest of ironies for the H bomb is the least lovable thing in the history of mankind. So, what are the origins of our anti-hero? Ede Teller. He was born on the 15th of January, 1908, in Budapest Austria-Hungary into a wealthy Jewish family. This is the the best impression I could get of where he lives. His parents were Max, a lawyer, and Ilona Deutsch, a pianist. The boy Teller attended the Minta gymnasium, a remarkable school in Budapest from which others found their way to Los Alamos. Lots to give thanks to the unique educational study to learn maths. They would send them off to gather statistics. To learn Latin, they would send them off to look at all the statues in Budapest. Teller became very interested in figures and would calculate large numbers in his head just for fun. Religion, Teller wrote, was not an issue in my family. Indeed it was never discussed. My only Jewish instruction came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if he existed. We needed him desperately, but we had not seen him for many thousands of years. After the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I in 1918, and following the short-lived communist government led by the Jewish Bela Kun. By way of a backlash, the discriminatory numerus clausus quota system was introduced into Hungary’s universities. Europe’s first fascist government was that of Miklos Horthy in Hungary, who proceeded Mussolini’s black shirt fascists in Italy by some two and a half years.

At the age of 18, in 1926, Teller left Hungary for Germany. The political climate revolutions, virulent antisemitism for Hungary having instilled in him a lifelong animosity to, sorry about this. Totalitarianism. Teller studied mathematics and chemistry in the University of Karlsruhe having as I say, left for Germany, from which he graduated in 1928 with a BSP in Chemical Engineering. Noticing impressive breakthroughs in quantum mechanics, however, he switched to physics. And at Leipzig University in 1930 and Werner Heisenberg, you see on the to the right of my screen. Anyway, at the precocious age of 22, Teller received his PhD in Physics. In 1932, during a summer stay in Rome with Enrico Fermi, Teller’s interest in nuclear physics began. In January 1933, as you know, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Teller came briefly to England, but a year later went to Copenhagen to work with the post World War I guru of all the physicists, Niels Bohr, who’s on the left of my screen. The house in the centre was a gift to Bohr on the occasion of getting his Nobel Prize from the Carlsberg Brewery. And it’s said that in the kitchen were three taps, hot, cold, and beer on line, on stream. In 1935, Teller was invited to become professor of Physics at George Washington University. Teller and Mitzi, his wife, became naturalised citizens of the United States on the 6th of March, 1941.

By then Teller was. There’s Mitzi’s CV. By then he was already well established as a theoretical physicist. Leo Szilard, also from Budapest, already in London in 1933 was the first to conceive of, and then he patented the nuclear chain reaction. Chain reaction had previously been observed only in chemistry. By 1939, however, he had reached New York, pursuing his quest to build the atomic bomb. To defeat Nazi Germany. He knew that he needed to gain the attention of President Roosevelt. It was Teller who took Szilard on two car journeys a week apart from Manhattan across the length of Long Island in an effort to find Szilard’s old collaborator and the most famous man in the world. Albert Einstein. Teller and Szilard by sheer good luck materialised on the great man’s doorstep at the very eastern tip of Long Island on the 2nd of August 1939. Teller ruefully reflects on his role, which you’ll hear him speak about in a moment. In saying, I entered history as Szilard’s chauffeur. This meeting led to two letters. Here’s only one of them. A long letter and a short letter from Einstein to President Roosevelt. This screen shows you the addressee and the signatory. On the basis of those letters, Roosevelt set up a committee to advise him about the advisability of going to make the atom bomb. One committee led to another. Szilard and Teller, being members of both. It was finally resolved that the President should be advised to build the bomb on the 6th of. I’m sorry.

• But we had a problem. How can we say what we had to say in a short enough way so the President can read it? Finally, we decided that atomic energy will rate one and a half pages, single spaced.

• [Video Narrator] Edward Teller, a third Jewish Hungarian refugee, drove Szilard to Einstein’s house for a final meeting on July 30th.

• I entered history as Szilard’s chauffeur.

• So the two commissions that were set up finally resolved on the evening of the 6th of December. As you see here. With a timetable to produce a bomb by January 1945. The very next morning, the 7th of December, 1941, was what Roosevelt called “a date that shall live in infamy.” The events at Pearl Harbour and Hitler’s reckless Declaration of War on the United States on the 11th of December somewhat accelerated the genesis of the Manhattan district, later the project, in January 1942. At this point, I might usefully mention my list of geniuses, 34 of them whom I identified in my research as, and who thanks to –

• Howard. Yes?

• [Host] Howard, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but the slides that you’re sharing seem to be super blurry and no one can read them. So do you want to stop sharing and let me do it, and see if that helps?

• Yes, let’s do that. So if you see slide 20, the 34 it says at the top, you see all sorts of amazing names there, probably there isn’t much time to go through them all because you just lost a few minutes. Anyway, but what I say about them is this. Thanks to Hitler, the wanton degradation of German science. The course of American science and technology was improved forever because the United States became the global centre of innovation in the 1950s. And it’s remained. This is proven by the fact that before the Second World War, hardly any Nobel prize had been awarded to Americans. Germany was number one, Britain two, France three. Today and since the 1950s, it’s been America number one. Britain, people run down so much. Number two, Germany three, and France four. Oppenheimer was appointed to lead the Los Alamos laboratory. Szilard, who had facilitated it, went to Chicago with Enrico Fermi, who had left Europe because his wife was Jewish. On the 2nd of December, the next slide, please. The first manmade self-sustaining yet controllable nuclear chain reaction was initiated by Szilard and Fermi in the world’s first atomic reactor. Ticking all the boxes, Teller went to Los Alamos. Hungarian, check. Jewish, check. Physicist, check. Genius, check. He goes to Los Alamos in March 1943 where he immediately starts to make.

Not least by playing the piano into the small hours. The purpose of the Manhattan Project was to build the atomic bomb that involved Szilard’s patented concept of fission, the process in which the nucleus of an atom splits in a chain reaction into two or more smaller nuclei. In little more than two and a half years, two cities would be atomized. Hiroshima on the 6th of August, 1945 and Nagasaki three days later. Hiroshima was the victim of Little Boy, which exploded with the energy of some 15 kilotons of TNT. The second benighted Japanese city, Nagasaki, was the victim of Fat Man, which exploded with the energy of around 21 kilotons of TNT. So Fat Man was 35% more powerful than Little Boy. What was the difference? Ah, sorry. You’re doing this. It’s not me. That Little Boy’s core was Uranium-235, for which the Americans could thank the British as their brilliant Jewish emigre, European emigre physicists, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch had identified that isotopes fit for purpose. Fat Man was a reworking of an abandoned project, Thin Man. From the Thin Man, the movie or the book that led to the movie, had a solid core of plutonium, which the Canadians had identified and developed as suitable for a chain reaction. Both the British and Canadian efforts were subsumed into the Manhattan Project. As doubtless you know for yourselves, and as will be confirmed later, no good term goes unpunished.

The gadget, the name given to the plutonium bomb tested at Trinity site, New Mexico, on the 16th of July, 1945. Thin Man, Little Boy, and Fat Man, were four atomic bombs that had emerged from Los Alamos. But that was an insufficient number for Edward Teller. You see, the first four bombs and all the nuclear weapons that the US, and for matter, the USSR, and Britain and France produced into the 1950s were based on Szilard’s original concept of nuclear fission from a chain reaction as he had patented and experimented with that led to pile one and to Nagasaki. Teller wanted something else. It was in 1941 that Enrico Fermi peaked Teller’s interest in atomic warfare via the fusion method. Initially, Teller was unconvinced, but he soon became fascinated by the profitability of a bomb with destructive power measured not in kilotons of TNT, but megatons. He soon became bored with the idea of just an atomic bomb, even though work on it had not even begun. When Teller was invited to be part of Robert Oppenheimer’s 1942 summer seminar at the University of California Berkeley. On the planning of the Manhattan Project, Teller sought to divert the discussion from a fission to a fusion weapon, what he called the super, meaning the hydrogen bomb. In March 1943, Teller joined the theoretical physics, T Division, at Los Alamos, but was appointed by Oppenheimer merely as a group leader. He was irked at being passed over as the head of T Division. That position having been given by Oppenheimer to Hans Bethe. B-E-T-H-E. Oppenheimer set Teller the task of investigating unusual approaches to building fission weapons such as auto catalysis, in which the efficiency of the bomb would increase as the nuclear chain reaction progressed. But this proved impractical. Impatient, Teller continued to push his ideas for a fusion weapon. Even though his own research kept reaching dead ends.

Oppenheimer regarded the super as a low priority sidetrack given the creation of fission weapon was proving to be difficult enough. On a visit to New York, Teller asked Maria Goeppert Mayer to carry out some calculations on the super. She was no slouch. She became the second woman after Marie Curie to win a Nobel Prize in Physics. She confirmed Teller’s own results. The super was not going to work. In March 1944, a special Los Alamos group was established by Bethe under Teller’s leadership to investigate the mathematics of an implosion type fission weapon. That too ran into difficulties, possibly because Teller, fixated on the super, did not work as diligently on the implosion calculations as Bethe required. It was clear that Teller’s obsession with the super was a diversion from the more single-minded La Alamos scientists, i.e., all the others. It was a diversion they didn’t need. At Bethe’s request the following June, Oppenheimer moved Teller out of T Division and placed him in charge of a special group responsible for the super reporting directly, but not too often, to Oppenheimer himself. Thus Oppenheimer removed a thorn from his side and Bethe’s. This inability of Teller to work collegially led to a disaster that was not to unfold for several years. He was replaced in T Division by Rudolph Peierls from the British mission. Peierls brought with him his great friend, German Baptist theoretical physicist and closet communist Klaus Fuchs, of who more later. Teller was undoubtedly a key figure in the Manhattan Project, contributing significantly to the development of the atomic bomb.

But he was, if you will forgive the mixed metaphor, a loose cannon. Known for his strong opinions and drive and for being complex and controversial. He was the bane of Oppenheimer’s life as the director of Los Alamos. But while Oppenheimer was focused on project’s purpose, to design an atomic bomb, Teller went on and on and on about the wanting the super, wanting the project to run before it could walk. That he was always a renegade is clear from the fact that he was one of the few scientists who actually watched, albeit with eye protection, the Trinity nuclear tests in the at Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert, ignoring orders to lie on the ground face down. The next atomic explosion would be over Hiroshima. So the route of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in retrospect is plain. One, Szilard conceives of the nuclear chain reaction. Two, Szilard secures Einstein’s letters to Roosevelt. Three, Roosevelt sets up the Manhattan Project. Four, Oppenheimer becomes director of Los Alamos. Five, Los Alamos creates the atomic bomb. Six, Truman orders the first detonation over Hiroshima. After the war, the end of World War II saw the exodus of thousands of scientists and engineers from Los Alamos. Teller left in February 1946 to join his friends, Enrico Fermi and Maria Goeppert Meyer, and to take up a chair at the University of Chicago. Leo Szilard concerned only to develop the atom bomb in order to defeat the Nazis, circulated a petition after V-E day, which argued that there should only be a demonstration to the Japanese of the new weapon, as the bomb should never be used on people. Teller, uncertain about signing Szilard’s petition, consulted Robert Oppenheimer, as though Oppie was Teller’s guru.

Oppenheimer advised that the nation’s fate should be left to, quote unquote, the sensible politicians in Washington. Teller decided not to sign the petition, however, something for which his memoirs expressed regret. Teller, in any event, eschewed fission weapons. He wanted to harness fusion. What, you have been thinking all along, is the difference? Do we have slide 24 up? We do. Thank you. Fission means splitting atoms. A heavy isotope like uranium-235 or plutonium is split into two lighter atoms. The chain reaction, the releasing of neutrons, which triggers the splitting of other atoms, creating the chain reaction, nuclear energy. And we know about nuclear waste, don’t we? And atomic bombs. Usually binding two light atoms like hydrogen to form a heavier atom like helium. Incredibly high temperatures and pressures similar to those found at the core of the sun. Clean energy. Fusion has the potential to be a virtually limitless clean energy source. The good news is it’s only 30 years away.

The bad news is it’s only been 30 years away for the past 75 years. And on the subject of bad news, hydrogen bomb are much bigger bang for your bucks. The equivalent of megatons, not kilotons of TNT. Usually is indeed the process employed in hydrogen bombs, which is crucial to note that to create the extreme conditions of heat and pressure to kickstart a hydrogen bomb. To recreate on earth, the core of the sun, you need a fuse, an atom bomb, and then to encase them together. So it takes an atom bomb to trigger an H bomb, but once you build the H bomb, there’s no limit to the expansion of its power. This truly was and is the doomsday weapon that will almost certainly destroy all of mankind. It’s just we don’t know when, and we’ve equally certainly got Edward Teller’s obsession with it to thank. In April 1946, Teller returned to Los Alamos to participate in a conference to review the wartime work on the super. The properties of thermonuclear fuels such as deuterium and the possible design of a hydrogen bomb were discussed. Fuchs not only participated in this conference, but actually took the minute.

The conference reached the conclusion that Teller’s assessments of the viability of the programme to build the hydrogen bomb had been too favourable. Despite this, Teller submitted an optimistic report in which he said that the hydrogen bomb was feasible and further work on its development should be encouraged. Work did continue on the H bomb at Los Alamos in the absence of Teller, but only in a way. Now let me introduce you to a person, not merely of brilliance, but also some dignity. Stanislaw Ulam was born in 1909 into a wealthy Polish-Jewish family at Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, or as we know it from reports of a hundred missiles hitting yesterday, was is known as Lvov, Ukraine. Stanislaw gained a PhD in 1933, and in 1941, having become a mathematician, computer scientist and nuclear physicist, he married Parisian Francoise Aron. From 1936, he worked at Princeton, Harvard, University of Wisconsin. In 1943, he became a US citizen as recruited by Hans Bethe to work at Los Alamos. He remained there until 1965. Stanislaw Ulam is one of the less known, less well-known, but nonetheless great heroes of this story. You’ll remember that we’re in 1946. The problem with the Super was an elaborate calculation, which Ulam had prepared with several other mathematicians to resolve whether Teller’s Super design would propagate thermonuclear burning. Without the results of that calculation, no progress was possible.

Three years pass without progress. In the autumn of 1949, Teller advocated a crash programme to develop the Super, but his design was still regarded as problematic. Every time he reported it was said he’d taken a step backwards. Teller’s response was, you just have to keep working on it. But the truth was that Teller himself wanted to postpone development of the Super until the mathematical analyzer, numerical integrator, and automatic computer. Can we have the next slide, please? Or MANIAC, was available and no one was taking bets on when that would be. In fact, it would be in March 1952. That was nine years after the Colossus computer started operating at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, England. On the 16th of June 1950, Ulam finished a second set of super ignition calculations. The results again were discouraging. Fermi returned to Los Alamos for the summer to help Ulam. Together, they concluded that Super just would not work. Teller was naturally informed but equally naturally, he remained or appeared to remain optimistic, saying there must have been some miscalculation. He continued to seek high and low for support for the H bomb project. Then he proposed the only different design as a demonstration piece for the people back in Washington. But those in the know appreciated, as they put it, that using a huge atomic bomb to ignite a little vial of deuterium and tritium was like using a blast furnace to light a match. Then two pivotal and dramatic events occurred. On the 23rd of September, 1949. President Truman announced to the world that the United States had evidence that the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb the previous month.

And in January 1950, Klaus Fuchs, who had returned to the United Kingdom, was arrested and confessed that he had been spying for the Soviets since 1942, passing them crucial secrets about the atomic bomb project. You will remember also that he’d been the notetaker during the Los Alamos meeting about the Super in April 1946. These two events, not least the reasonable suspicion that the Soviets knew that the Americans wished to build a hydrogen bomb led Truman to approve massive funding for building the world’s first super bomb, which was infinitely easier said than done. In the autumn of 1949, Teller advocated the crash programme for the development of the Super. The official United States Atomic Energy Commission History states that there was a crucial top level meeting at Los Alamos in October 1950. Teller summarised the super programme to date but was unable to offer little more than determination. He had no new ideas. In some way, success would be grasped. How, he did not know. The committee terminated design development and no one knew whether the Russians were similarly. Bankrupt of ideas, though he admitted himself, Teller could still insult his Los Alamos colleagues. Francoise Ulam remembered of the that time, I sensed the tension in the corridors. There was bafflements and sometimes annoyance at Teller’s autocratic behaviour and temperamental outbursts. I had the feeling that no one knew quite how to handle his demands and sort of caved in. Apart from Stan.

The Ulams were about to become the heroes of the piece. Now, as an aside, let me suggest to you that had it not been for the McMahon Act, the United States Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which determines how the United States would control and manage the nuclear technology it had jointly developed with its World War II allies, United Kingdoms and Canada, who were then excluded by this act from future participation. There could well have been continuing collaboration between the US and the UK and progress towards the Super could well have been made, for the British had Colossus. And the calculations would’ve been speeded up incalculably. Well, that’s an alternative version of history. The reality was that Teller was desperate. He proposed a number of complicated schemes to resuscitate the Super, none of which showed much promise. He was referred to as a kind of missionary. Maybe John the Baptist is a little over exaggeration, but he’d have been happy if we’d taken all our resources and put them into the fusion bomb. Said Sumner Pike, the AEC Commissioner. Los Alamos theoretician Charles Critchfield was equally blunt. Teller has a messianic complex. Then a black swan event occurred. Following long arguments about whether a super weapon would ever be deployed amidst the fear that the Soviets might be the first to do so. On the 31st of January, Truman, in a knee-jerk reaction to the debate publicly announced his decision to support the development of the hydrogen bomb. A weapon theorised to be hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II, letting the cat officially out of the bag. The Russians were aware of Truman’s ambition, yet no one at Los Alamos knew how to satisfy it. Another year passed.

Then in January 1951, progress was suddenly made. Francoise Ulam later wrote, “Engraved on my memory is the day when I found Stan at noon staring intensely out of a window, with a very strange expression on his face. Peering unseeing into the garden, he said, ‘I found a way to make it work.’ ‘What work?’ I asked.” Francoise asked. “The super, he replied. It’s a totally different scheme. And it’ll change the course of history.” Ulam put his concept to Teller saying that he realised that the issue was compression. An implosion of the main body of the device in order to obtain very high compressions of the thermonuclear part, which in a second step might be made to give a considerable yield. Teller initially expressed scepticism. He then, because we’re running short of time, I have to jump and tell you that he found a parallel version, an alternative to what Ulam proposed. Teller and Ulam joined the issued to paper, but Teller found it intolerable that someone might share the credit for the historic invention on which he had been working single-mindedly for almost a decade. He moved immediately to take over the technical breakthrough and make it his own. He pushed Ulam aside, and Ulam rather pitied him, secure in his mind that his input had been useful. Dignity, we might say in the face of Philistinism. In March 1951, Teller added another gadget to the configuration, and now momentum was building. But despite self-aggrandizement, Teller suspected he was going to be sidestepped. Sidelined, he offered to stay on at Los Alamos if he had administrative responsibility over thermonuclear development.

But he was offered only an assistant directorship or a consultancy. The final straw for Teller was added when Norris Bradbury, Oppenheimer’s successor as director of Los Alamos, 1945 till 1970, made the decision to appoint experimental physicist Marshall Holloway to head the thermonuclear programme. It was observed that Bradbury was too smart to let Teller have any administrative authority. In the crucial six months between October 1951 and April 1952 when Equilibrium Thermonuclear was the centre of the design work, Teller spent only two weeks at Los Alamos. His main contribution, it was said, was to kibitz. Once Teller left Los Alamos, Bethe observed, even though they were working on his weapon, he found all sorts of reasons to assert that it wouldn’t work. He hated project director Marshall Holloway, so he tried to criticise it wherever possible. Eventually the diligent team at Los Alamos believed they had a device that would work. The first test of the Super would be at Enewetak Atoll, comprising of a rough circle of 40 islands in the Pacific Ocean around halfway between Hawaii and Tokyo. Elugelab was a small, spade-shaped outcrop of coral and sand some 20 miles north of the large atoll island. Harry. I think I put Stanley on the slide. Forgive me. Where the technical and scientific missions were based. H hour was set for 1st of November 1952, 7:15, local time. 0-7-15, local time. At that moment, 92 detonators fired simultaneously. 80 generations and a few millionths of a second later. X-rays from the furiously heating fission fireball, hotter than the centre of the sun, escape the primary mass, heating the deuterium to thermonuclear temperatures and activating a second fission explosion. So you’ve got two atoms bombs and an H bomb together.

Once this unique explosive cocktail broke through the casing, and I trust you can view the drawings. They’re not technical drawings. It’s expanded in seconds to a blinding white fireball. More than three miles across, 30 times that of the Hiroshima fireball, the monitoring crews 20 miles away felt the blast of heat, as though somebody had opened a hot oven door. One sailor who turned around like Lot’s wife to look, wrote home, you would swear that the whole world was on fire. For a moment, the fireball seemed to hover, then swirling, boiling, glowing purple, the expanding fireball began to rise. It became our beloved mushroom. The mushroom cloud balanced on a wide dirty stem with a curtain of water around its base that slowly fell back into the sea. Enlarging fireball reached 57,000 feet. I think that’s around twice the cruising height of the passenger jet today. In a minute and a half, the shockwave was accompanied by a sharp bang, followed by a peel of thunder. After five minutes, the cloud hit the stratosphere and began to spread out. It stemmed eight miles across its top, 27 miles above the so-called Pacific Ocean.

The 10.4 megaton thermonuclear device built on the Teller-Ulam principles of stage radiation implosion instantly vaporised the entire island of Elugelab, leaving behind a circular crater 200 feet deep, more than a mile across, filled with seawater. The explosion lifted into the air some 80 million tonnes of irradiated material that would fall out all around the world. Let’s see if we can, I don’t know if you can play this next.

• [Announcer] You have a grandstand seat here to one of the most momentous events in the history of science. In less than a minute, you will see the most powerful explosion ever witnessed by human eyes. The blast will come out of the horizon just about there, and this is the significance of the moment. This is the first full scale test of a hydrogen device. If the reaction goes, we’re in the thermonuclear era. For the sake of all of us, and for the sake of our country, I know that you join me in wishing this expedition well. It is now 30 seconds to zero time. Put on goggles or turn away. Do not remove goggles or face burst until 10 seconds after the first light Minus 15 seconds. Minus 10 seconds. 9, 8, 7, 6. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. T-zero. Thank you. Teller didn’t go to any Enewetak to watch his former colleagues explode the thermonuclear device of which he and Enrico Fermi have first spoken in 1941, that he had fought for and helped to invent. He claimed he was too busy setting up the new Lawrence Livermore weapons laboratory in California. Few doubted his business and hostility, and perhaps also jealousy kept him away. He’d not expected the Los Alamos people to do the job without him. But once he understood that the super probably would would work, he and his colleagues devised a way to observe the explosion via an instrumentation in California. Two months later, on the 7th of January, 1953, Harry Truman amount announced we have entered another stage in the world shaking development of atomic energy. From now on, man moves into a new era of destructive power. Aren’t we lucky?

Truman assured his audience only eight years after the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the US was not interested in offensively deploying so devastating a weapon, but alas, science only knew to march forward, and the US had no alternative but to press on and probe the secrets of atomic power to the utmost of our capacity. Truman then went on to warn Stalin that Lenin’s idea of an inevitable war between communist Russia and the West was a stage in the development of communism. And as Truman warned Stalin that it would only be a stage in the development of the destruction of the world. Perhaps Truman had expected the Soviets to cave. But nearly two years later, on the 25th of November, 1955, the Soviet Union detected detonated its first hydrogen bomb on the same principle of radiation implosion. Both superpowers now held what the Americans called the hell bomb. Today, each superpower, America, Russia, and China have tens of thousands of H bomb warheads and the world has lived with but under the threat of thermonuclear war ever since. The development of the H bomb did not, however, happen in the vacuum. There was much debate amongst nuclear scientists, the military and the politicians about whether such a bomb had any validity as a weapon of war, or was just a way to commit mass genocide. It was not long before this evolved into MAD, mutual assured destruction. You can imagine where Teller stood on this.

Others, not Leo Szilard, who had campaigned against the use even of the atom bomb after the defeat of the Nazis. And Oppenheimer, who was always lukewarm about it, had sought to persuade the President against going for it. In 1949, and some of this you may recollect from the movie “Oppenheimer,” Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, made his position in the letter to the President very clear. A government of atheists, a clear reference to the Soviets, is not likely to be dissuaded from producing the weapon on moral grounds. The danger in the weapon does not reside in its physical nature, but in human behaviour. Its unilateral annunciation by the United States could very easily result in its unilateral possession by the Soviet government. I believe it’s unwise to renounce unilaterally any weapon which an enemy can reasonably be expected to possess. Was the father of this terrible weapon, Edward Teller, with his associated tensions and challenges, or was it Stanislaw Ulam? Norris Bradbury observed that nobody was the father of the hydrogen bomb as its development was a group effort to turn Teller’s and Ulam’s concepts into physical reality, work at which steady and reliable men shun and Teller did not. May we perhaps settle on Teller and Ulam having been its parents. Certainly, Teller was no team player, and such projects have to be team efforts. Imperious, childishly unpleasant to those by whom he felt belittled, he may have been, but without him might the Americans have had to be satisfied with an atom bomb?

Well, they might had it not been for the realisation that Fuchs had been present at the meeting when the H bomb design was discussed. And why was he there? Because Rudolf Peierls had to become Teller’s successor in T Division because Teller couldn’t work with people. Had Teller behaved himself, Fuchs might never have heard about Teller’s Super. Teller never forgave Oppenheimer for choosing another man to run T Division at Los Alamos. In March 1950, Teller sought out William Borden, a single-minded, young H bomb zealot on Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and suggested to Borden that slow going on the hydrogen bomb had been the hard fault of Oppenheimer while discouraging younger men from working on the project. A few months later, Teller planted another seed with Borden. Oppenheimer, he said, had quite leftist back in the day. His brother, Frank, would never have joined the communist party without Robert’s approval. It was Robert who brought Frank to Los Alamos to work on the atomic bomb, and the security clearance allowed him to know everything. So Oppenheimer was well placed to be the most damaging spy in American history. That is if he were a spy. Teller’s testimony against Oppenheimer during the security clearance hearings in 1950 destroyed Oppenheimer, as we saw in the eponymous film. As a result of Teller’s animus, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance and his self-esteem. He fared only a little less badly than Alan Turing in this country. But that’s another story. It also damaged Teller’s reputation and alienated many former colleagues. Teller, who pushed for the hydrogen bomb project for a decade and was not to work on it. And who stabbed his mentor in the back was indeed Los Alamos’ anti-hero, and only questionably, the father of the bomb.

Now ladies and gentlemen, in the light of the tensions and challenges that Teller presented, with his premature obsession and with his perpetual conflicts with Oppenheimer to the point of destroying him with more than an in innuendo about his being a Soviet spy, I believe you’ll see why I labelled him an anti-hero. Can a hydrogen bomb ever be used? In 2017, Daniel Ellsberg published “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” This is the man whom Nixon called the most dangerous man in America when he leaked the Pentagon Papers. Previously, in his 1981 essay, “Call to Mutiny,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote, “Every President from Truman to Reagan, with the possible exception of Ford, has felt compelled to consider or direct serious preparations for possible United States initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare. Some of these threats were implicit, many were explicit, and it may therefore be said that the nuclear weapon has been deployed as a threat on well over 25 occasions.” That’s the number listed by Ellsberg in 2017. Let’s just give the last word to Dr. Strangelove. I think we’ve just about got time for two minutes and 39 seconds of it, please.

• [Host] Sorry, is it that easier?

• So ambitious, and we’ve run out of time. I’m awful sorry. But I strongly recommend you go to YouTube and look up Dr. Strangelove and see the genius piece of Peter Sellers playing that part. The last slide, please. The last but one are the books that I mainly referred to. I don’t know if you can see it.

• [Host] The books are up now.

• Yes. Two brilliant books by Richard Rhodes. “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” And “Dark Sun,” a very difficult book about the hydrogen bomb, but lots about the Jews who leaked the Soviet secrets, the nuclear secrets to the Soviets. Lots on that. Of course the most damaging one was the Baptist Klaus Fuchs, if that’s any consolation. And “The Doomsday Machine” by Daniel Ellsberg. And the final slide please, is of my bibliography, my own books, which you can find if you Google Howard Epstein author in your spare time. And now I need to find the questions. Q and A. There we are.

Q&A and Comments:

I think there were lots of ill effects on people in the Pacific Ocean, not merely on the on the ships. Japanese fishermen trust the Japanese to cop for it, as though they hadn’t had enough with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think most of these questions are about the slides. Dunno if anyone wants to put another question up in the last moment or two. Thank you for mentioning Fermi’s book, Fermi’s wife’s book’s. “Atoms in the Family.” Lovely woman was Louise Sweet’s neighbour. at the University of Chicago. Wow. And I think there are no other questions.

Q - [Host] Howard, there is actually a question here. It says, what effects did the men on the ship have?

A - Oh yeah. So I mentioned that. Probably they had cancer later in life almost certainly, but fishermen in the Pacific really caught for it. And people were moved off islands but not moved far enough away. I mean the legacy is horrendous. And instantly, what you might find interesting if we still got two, is why did they have to drop the bomb on Nagasaki? And you might think it was because they wanted to test the plutonium bomb as opposed to a uranium-235 bomb. But they’d already tested a plutonium bomb at Trinity base. So the answer is if you research it deeply enough, I believe, that the Navy Department, US Navy Department calculated as if the Americans had to invade the Japanese home islands. The Japanese would weaponize every kid seven and up to resist the American occupation, and 10 million people would’ve died. Which is why I often label my talk on Szilard the Jew who saved 10 million Japanese lives. And I also mentioned Heisenberg, who was, you remember the slide where he’s shown with Niels Bohr. There’s an amazing book you can get the play by Michael Frayn.

You can buy the script called “Copenhagen,” which was a play on BBC2 about 25 years ago, in which Heisenberg, who had been Bohr’s best friend and they were each other’s mentor, had travelled to occupied Copenhagen during the war, tailed by the Gestapo. And they took a walk in the woods near Bohr’s house. And I should tell you that Heisenberg, one of his great achievements was the uncertainty principle. And what the two of them talked about in their walk in the woods is totally uncertain. Did Heisenberg go to see Bohr to get his blessing for the Germans to build a bomb? Or to tell Bohr that they couldn’t build the bomb, the Germans failed totally. Because they didn’t work out that to control the nuclear chain reaction, you needed faultless graphite, where Szilard asked the question when he went to some American conglomerate. Can I have graphite? Yes. Will it be fault free? No, it contains a lot of boron. Szilard insisted on blemish free graphite and that was the departure of the American and the German efforts. So even after the war, Heisenberg and Bohr couldn’t agree on what they discussed during their walk in the woods. Absolutely fascinating.

As are many of the other books which I haven’t listed here on the whole atomic, on the nuclear physicists between the war. It’s endlessly fascinating, and it will be until somebody by mistake fired off a nuclear weapon. If you watch programme on BBC2, I think, called “Turning Point,” or maybe it’s on one of the other channels, I’m not sure. “Turning Point” discussing nuclear war and hydrogen bombs. One pundit comes on the screen and says, what really bothers me is we’ll all wake up one morning, go off to work, and in the evening, billions of people will be dead and no one will know why. Happy thought.

• [Host] Amazing. Thanks so much Howard. It was lovely to meet you and I’m glad we sorted all the tech out.