Nuclear weapons Teller

In 1958, Pauling (left) appeared in a televised debate on the danger of fallout from atomic bombs with Edward Teller (center), a staunch anticommunist and defender of nuclear weapons. 

These first nuclear weapons were atomic bombs or A-bombs. They depended on the energy produced by nuclear fission for their destructive power. However, scientists like U.S. physicist Edward Teller (1908-) knew even before the first atomic bomb exploded that the fission weapons... 

Teller passionately disagreed. He expressed himself as terribly pessimistic about relations with Russia, Bethe remembers of a conversation the two theoreticians had that winter. He was terribly anti-communist, terribly anti-Russian. Now I knew that he had been anti-commimist during the communist takeover in Hungary when he was about eleven, but now it came out in a much more forceful way. Teller said we had to continue research on nuclear weapons. .. it was really wrong of all of us to want to leave. The war was not over and Russia was just as dangerous an enemy as... 

His immediate response was to take his problem to Fermi. Fermi apparently argued with him, consistent with the Interim Committee Scientific Panel letter of August 17, that the solution to the problem of nuclear weapons must be a political solution. Fermi thought Teller was overly optimistic as well about the early prospects for a successful thermonuclear. Not only... 

Edward Teller returned to Los Alamos in April 1946 to chair a secret conference. Its purpose, according to a subsequent report, was to review work that has been done on the Super for completeness and accuracy and to make suggestions concerning further work that would be needed in this field if actual construction and test of the Super were plaimed. John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam and Norris Bradbury attended the conference, as did Emil Konopinski, John Manley, Philip Morrison, Canadian theoretician J. Carson Mark and a crowd of other participants. One whose presence would vitally affect U.S. nuclear weapons policy later was Klaus Fuchs. 

TELLER-ULAM CONCEPT. On 13 January 1950, President Harry S. Traman atmounced that he was directing the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to develop a thermonuclear weapon. At the time, U.S. nuclear weapon designers had failed to develop a successful concept for such a device. In late 1950 and early 1951, physicists Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller advanced a concept for such a... 

Teller was thus back at weapons work when Harry Truman announced, on September 23, 1949, the explosion of Joe I, the first Soviet atomic bomb. Like most Americans, Teller had not expected the Soviet success so soon. He called Oppenheimer on the day the Soviet test was announced in a state of arousal sufficient to cause Oppenheimer to advise him sharply, Keep your shirt on. He testified later that his mind did not immediately turn in the direction of working on the thermonuclear bomb, but in fact he discussed that prospect intensely at Los Alamos early in October with Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez, who encouraged him. The American nuclear monopoly had ended. The fabulous monster had real claws. If the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb, could a Soviet hydrogen bomb be far behind Teller decided that the only possible hope for continued national security was an all-out American effort to build the Super. 

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