Teller, Edward (1908-)

Hungarian-born US physicist known as the father of the hydrogen bomb. He worked on the fission bomb - the first atomic bomb - 1942-46 (the Manhattan Project) and on the fusion bomb, or H-bomb, 1946-52. In the 1980s he was one of the leading supporters of the Star Wars programme (Strategic Defense Initiative). He was a key witness against his colleague Robert Oppenheimer at the security hearings 1954. Teller was widely believed to be the model for the leading character in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr Strangelove. It was also Teller who convinced President Reagan of the feasibility of the Star Wars project for militarizing space with fission-bomb-powered X-ray lasers. Millions of dollars were spent before the project was discredited. Teller then suggested 'brilliant pebbles' - thousands of missile-interceptors based in space - and 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. He left Germany 1933 when the Nazis came to power, and emigrated to the USA 1935, becoming professor at George Washington University, Washington DC. He joined the University of Chicago 1942 to work on atomic fission, and then moved to Los Alamos. By the end of World War II, Teller had designed an H-bomb, 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 (1909-1985) 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.