EDWARD TELLER had a longer and more intimate acquaintance with nuclear weapons than any man in history. During World War II, the brilliant, Hungarian-born physicist, fearful that Hitler was building an A-bomb, was among those who got Albert Einstein to nudge F.D.R. into starting what became the Manhattan Project. After the war, Teller pushed for the "super"--the H-bomb. The rabid anticommunist became a scientific pariah in the 1950s for implying that his former boss, Manhattan Project head J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a security risk. Teller was considered the model for Dr. Strangelove, the bomb-loving scientist in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 movie. In...
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