Teller, Edward (1908–2003)

Hungarian-born US physicist known as the father of the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb). He worked on the Manhattan Project developing the fission bomb – the first atomic bomb 1942–46, and on the fusion, or hydrogen, bomb 1946–52. Vigorous in his promotion of nuclear weapons and in his opposition to communism, he was, in the 1980s, one of the leading advocates of the Star Wars programme (the Strategic Defense Initiative).

He was a key witness against his colleague J Robert Oppenheimer at the security hearings in 1954. Teller was widely believed to be the model for the leading character in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr Strangelove (1964). It was also Teller who convinced US president Ronald Reagan of the feasibility of the Star Wars project for putting fission-bomb-powered X-ray lasers into orbit for the purpose of shooting down enemy ballistic missiles. Millions of dollars were spent before the project was discontiued. Teller also suggested the use of nuclear explosions to prevent asteroids hitting the Earth. He opposed all test-ban treaties.

Teller was born in Budapest and studied there and at various German universities, receiving his PhD from the University of Leipzig in 1930. He left Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, and emigrated to the USA in 1935, becoming professor at George Washington University, Washington, DC. He joined the staff of Columbia University in 1941 and the University of Chicago in 1942 to work on atomic fission, and then joined the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. By the end of World War II, Teller had designed an H-bomb (with Stanislaw Ulam), and in 1951 he was given responsibility for constructing one. It was successfully tested on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in 1952. By then, a second nuclear-weapons research facility had opened, the Lawrence-Livermore Laboratory near Berkeley, California. Teller was Livermore's associate director 1954–75, as well as professor at the University of California from 1953. The original idea of using a fission explosion to ignite a thermonuclear (fusion) explosion in deuterium (heavy hydrogen) came from Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi. Polish-born mathematician Stanislaw Ulam then suggested a configuration in which shock waves from the fission explosion would compress and heat the deuterium, causing it to explode. Teller modified this idea to use X-rays from the first explosion, rather than shock waves.