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At the Atomic Energy Commission's Livermore, Calif, fusion laboratory, Teller turns his mind to development of tactical-size, low-fallout thermonuclear weapons. In addition, he serves on the AEC's General Advisory Committee and the Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board, carries on his own strenuous public education campaign in media as far afield from pure science as the This Week Sunday supplement. Main topics: the survival value of underground bomb shelters, the need for continued nuclear-weapons tests, and, above all, the urgency of keeping ahead of Russia in science.
Multiple Monomania. With all this, plus university duties as an associate director of the Radiation Laboratory and a teacher of postgraduate physics. Teller's life shows scant resemblance to the stereotype of the scientist at work, insulated from the clamors and interruptions of the outside world. Even before Teller leaves his garden-girdled house in Berkeley in the morning, his harried secretary usually puts through two or three long-distance calls. After he gets to his office, a train of thought about some theoretical problem in nuclear physics is likely to be interrupted by a query from the Pentagon or a reminder that it is time to leave for the San Francisco airport to catch an outgoing plane. On his trips to the AEC's Livermore lab, 45 miles from Berkeley, Teller dictates letters to his secretary while driving. It is no wonder that Teller has not found time to finish the atomic alphabet (see box) that he started writing for his two youngsters.
Teller's hectic schedule has damaged his health: suffering from ulcerative colitis, he takes daily doses of atropine and phenobarbital, sticks to a doctor-ordered diet, painful for a man who devours food with Hungarian gusto. But a damaged constitution has not damped his crusader's fervor. The late great Nuclear Physicist Enrico Fermi once said to him, with affectionate exasperation: "In my acquaintance, you are the only monomaniac with several manias." Princeton Physicist John Wheeler, who worked on both the A-bomb and the H-bomb, put it more truly. The essence of Teller's character, Wheeler said recently, is that he "cares very much."
A Lost War. Edward Teller's intense concern with the menace of tyranny traces back to his Hungarian childhood. When Teller was born, in 1908, into a Jewish family with culture and money, citizens of gay, well-fed Budapest could believe that the world was solid, dependable. But Austria-Hungary got into World War 1 on the losing side, and the seemingly solid world crumbled. Defeated Hungary lost two-thirds of its prewar territory, and the country's economy collapsed in wild inflation. With the nation's life disrupted and anti-Semitism rampant, Teller's father dinned into his son two grim lessons: 1) he would have to emigrate to some more favorable country when he grew up, and 2) as a member of a disliked minority he would have to excel the average just to stay even.
"All this has great relevance to me," says Teller. "I have seen, in Hungary, at least one society that was once healthy go completely to the dogs. I have seen the consequences of a lost war. I have also seen very many people, with all the evidence before them, refuse to believe what they saw."