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EDWARD TELLER
(Physicist, Los Alamos Theoretical Division, director Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
People > Scientists
Edward Teller, a theoretical physicist, was born on January 18, 1908, into a prosperous, middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. The turbulence caused by World War I followed by revolution and successive socialist and authoritarian Hungarian regimes prompted Teller to leave Hungary. In 1926, he began studies at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, earning a degree in chemical engineering. After a brief stint at the University of Munich, where he met first met Hans Bethe and had his right foot severed in a street car accident, he moved to the University of Leipzig and studied under the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was one of the central figures in the development of quantum mechanics. He completed his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1930. Teller took a position at the University of Göttingen's Institute of Physical Chemistry, but, with the rise of the Nazi regime, he went first to London in 1933 and then took a post-doctoral fellowship with famed physicist Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. After teaching briefly at London City College, Teller in 1935 accepted an academic position at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of George Gamow, a friend and young Russian physicist and émigré who was the first to apply quantum mechanics to nuclear physics. Gamow initiated the annual Washington Conferences on Theoretical Physics, and it was at the January 1939 meeting that Teller first learned from Bohr of the discovery of fission in uranium by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman the previous month. Discussions with fellow Hungarian émigrés Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, who were fearful that an atomic bomb was possible and might be developed by Nazi Germany, prompted the three in July 1939 to approach Albert Einstein and convince him to attach his name to a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning of the potential threat of atomic weapons. 
Teller worked on the bomb effort for the duration of the war. Roosevelt, in response to the Einstein letter, created a committee on uranium research. The committee convened on October 21, 1939, with Teller and his fellow Hungarians in attendance, and limited government support was soon forthcoming. Teller continued to teach at George Washington, but he spent some time at Columbia University as a "consultant-peacemaker" for Szilard and Enrico Fermi as they sought to prove the chain reaction. In late spring 1941, at the suggestion of Bethe, Teller was offered a position at Columbia to work on the chain reaction project. In early 1942, he went with Fermi to the newly formed Met Lab at the University of Chicago where, Arthur Compton had centralized chain reaction/plutonium production research. At the same time, Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist at the University of California at Berkeley whom Compton had asked to coordinate weapon theory and fast neutron research, invited Teller to attend a joint meeting of theorists and experimentalists. Oppenheimer thought highly of Teller. In May, he wrote Ernest Lawrence that with "three experienced men" it would be possible to solve the theoretical problems of building a bomb. His short list of experienced theorists included Teller, along with Bethe, John Van Vleck, and Robert Serber. An initial two-day meeting held in early June in Chicago. From Chicago, the Tellers drove with their good friends Bethe and his wife to Berkeley where a second, longer conference took place at Berkeley beginning the second week of July. At Berkeley, a broad range of theoretical issues were discussed, including a thermonuclear bomb, which became known as the Super, and the possibility of igniting the atmosphere with a fission device. Teller, who felt he was being underutilized at the Met Lab, became increasingly involved in weapon theory and looked forward to moving to the new secret laboratory at Los Alamos. He was one of the first to arrive in early spring 1943, helping Oppenheimer organize the lab and leading discussion on autocatalytic methods for enhancing bomb efficiency on the eighth day of the ten-day technical orientation conference. Oppenheimer, however, passed over Teller and appointed Bethe as head of the lab's Theoretical (or T) Division, with Teller working for Bethe. Initially, Bethe did not divide T-Division into subgroups, but Teller's contributions to implosion theory in fall 1943 prompted him to place Teller in charge of implosion as well as the Super. As implosion became more critical in early 1944, friction developed when, to the annoyance of both Bethe and Oppenheimer, Teller was working less on implosion and more on the thermonuclear bomb. Teller, as Bethe later described it, "spent a great deal of time talking and very little time doing solid work on the main line of the Laboratory. To the rest of us who felt we had a vital job to do, this type of diversion was irksome." At Bethe's request, Oppenheimer in June moved Teller out of T-Division and made him head of an independent group working on the Super and other assignments. Teller reported directly to Oppenheimer, with the two meeting for an hour once a week. When Fermi joined the Los Alamos staff in September 1944, he headed up the new F-Division that included Teller's group. Teller's work on the Super did not contribute to the main goal of building an atomic bomb, but it did break ground for the successful work on the thermonuclear bomb in the early 1950s. 
After the war, Teller wanted to remain at Los Alamos working on the Super, but lack of support for a full-fledged research effort convinced him to leave the weapons lab in February 1946. He accepted an academic position, as did Fermi, at the University of Chicago. In June 1949, he returned to Los Alamos, on leave of absence from Chicago. The testing by the Soviet Union of an atomic bomb in late August and the decision by President Harry Truman to accelerate development of a thermonuclear weapon in January 1950 made the Super a top priority. Calculations by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, however, indicated that a fusion reaction could not be sustained in the proposed design. In early 1951, Ulam and Teller proposed a radically new and more promising approach for starting and sustaining a fusion reaction. They proposed using x-rays produced by the fission primary, rather than other attributes from the detonation, to compress the secondary. The result was the first successful test of a thermonuclear device in fall 1952. 
Teller was instrumental in the establishment of a second weapons laboratory in summer 1952 at Livermore, California. He had not agreed with senior staff at Los Alamos on how the thermonuclear weapons developmental program should proceed and finally concluded that a second lab was needed. With support from Ernest Lawrence and his Radiation Laboratory colleagues, as well as the Air Force and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the new lab was forced on a reluctant Atomic Energy Commission. Herbert York became the first director. Associated for the rest of his life with the Livermore lab, Teller served as director from 1958 to 1960. In 1954, Teller alienated many of his colleagues and fellow Manhattan Project alumni by recommending against the continuation of Oppenheimer's security clearance. In the 1980s, Teller became a staunch supporter of President Ronald Reagan's plan for space based missile defense technology termed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars" by the program's detractors. Teller was awarded the National Medal of Science for 1982 by President Reagan, the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the nation's highest civilian honor) in 2003. Teller died in September 2003 in Palo Alto, California.
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The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources. Major sources consulted include the following. Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946: Volume I, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), 20, 232, 242, 246-47, 632; Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield, 1947-1952: Volume II, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), 362-409, 438-41, 529-31, 535-37, 539-41, 554-56, 568-71, 581-84; Lillian Hoddeson, et. al. Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 42-47, 54-55, 68-69, 129-31, 157-62, 179, 203-4, 246, 412; Freeman J. Dyson, Edward Teller, 1908-2003, A Biographical Memoir (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 2007), 3-19; Hans A. Bethe, "Comments on the History of the H-Bomb," Los Alamos Science (Fall 1982): 43-53, "spent a great deal of time…" quote on p. 44; Edward Teller with Judith Shoolery, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (New York: Perseus, 2001), "consultant-peacemaker" reference on p. 144. See also Edward Teller, with Allen Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1962), and Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). The photograph of Teller at his desk as director at Livermore is courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Note that on the wall behind his desk there is a poster of the alpha racetrack for the Oak Ridge calutron during the Manhattan Project. The other is a poster of the mushroom cloud from a postwar hydrogen bomb blast. The photograph from Teller's award ceremony with Seaborg and John F. Kennedy appears courtesy the Department of Energy. The letter from Teller to Fermi can be found at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Record Group 77 (Manhattan Engineer District), Harrison-Bundy Files, box 153, folder 76.