Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, last week published his eagerly awaited account of the explorations that made the weapon possible. Printed in Science, weekly publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and entitled "The Work of Many People," it is a modest and moving effort to close the rift opened by the political and ethical debate over whether to go ahead with the "super."
"At the present time," says Teller, "I find myself unhappily in a situation of being given certainly too much credit and perhaps too much blame for what has happened. Yet, I feel that the development of the hydrogen bomb should not divide those who in the past have argued about it, but rather should unite all of us who, in a close or distant way, by work or by criticism, have contributed toward its completion. Disunity of the scientists is one of the greatest dangers for our country."
Intent on those two aims—service to his adopted country and the cooperation of scientists in the pursuit of truth—Hungarian-born Scientist Teller carefully refrains from raking over the old controversy about whether an H-bomb should be attempted. He says he does not know enough to write of the political controversy over the H-bomb, "but I feel that great gratitude is due to the men who in those difficult weeks [after the Soviet atomic explosion about Sept. 1, 1949] arrived at the correct conclusions," i.e., to proceed with all possible speed toward the development of an H-bomb. Teller's account minimizes his own part in that development far beneath the credit given him by other scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer. Says Teller: "I want to claim credit in one respect only. I believed and continued to believe in the possibility and the necessity of developing the thermonuclear bomb." Wholly aside from his theoretical contributions, this is Teller's lien upon the gratitude of his countrymen, that he was not diverted from the path of scientific advance by confusion over nonscientific considerations.
From Bukharin to "Mike." His story of the bomb's long development contains the names of 58 men. Teller comes as close as security will let him to telling what each contributed. Highlights:
¶ His story starts in 1934 when George Gamow, a Russian physicist who had escaped from the U.S.S.R., arrived in the U.S. Gamow had a tale to tell that flashed back to 1932. He had talked at a Russian scientific meeting about a paper by an English astronomer and a German physicist who suggested that the energy radiated by the sun and other stars was caused by reactions between atomic nuclei. A nonscientist, Nikolai Bukharin, a top Communist official in the post-Lenin era, approached Gamow. He asked Gamow if nuclear reactions like those of the sun could be created on earth and put to some use. Bukharin even offered to turn over the Leningrad electrical works to Gamow for a few hours every night for experimentation. Gamow replied that no practical application was possible. But the incident stuck in his mind, and he was later to stir the interest of U.S. scientists in thermonuclear reactions like those inside the stars. (If the Communists ever decide to canonize Bukharin, whom they executed in 1938, they may claim him as the grandfather of the H-bomb.)