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Teller did not know it then, but the trip to Peconic Bay was a turning point in his life—the start of his deep involvement in weaponry, war and politics. When he went to Columbia to work with Szilard on an atomic-energy project, Teller intended to go back to George Washington some day and resume his pure-science investigations into the minute structure of matter. That day never came. In 1943 he found himself heading to New Mexico to work at the Los Alamos A-bomb lab. Recalls Teller: "I was then on leave of absence from the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory [another atomic project], where I was on leave from Columbia, where I was on leave from George Washington." The snarled threads of his life were never to be straightened.
Sin & the Super. In the Manhattan Engineer District days, while the first A-bomb was still in the making, Teller's mind leaped ahead to the possibilities of a thermonuclear bomb repeating on earth the fusion that makes the stars glow. But at war's end he found most of his fellow scientists unwilling to work toward the "super." The deadly success of their A-bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had rocked the consciences of the atomic scientists. "The physicists have known sin," said Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Los Alamos' wartime director, and most of his colleagues agreed with him.
When the Los Alamos bombmakers scattered, Teller accepted an invitation to work with Enrico Fermi at Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies. Teller kept urging an H-bomb program, but nobody seemed interested.
In August, 1949, years ahead of the most pessimistic U.S. predictions, the Russians achieved their first atomic explosion. Far from urging a crash program to produce an H-bomb, the Atomic Energy Commission's influential General Advisory Committee of scientists, chaired by Oppenheimer, voted flatly and unanimously against any H-bomb program.
Teller had to make an agonizing decision: either accept the G.A.C. verdict against his own passionate conviction that it endangered the nation, or fight the decision, with little chance of winning, and at the cost of ostracism by many of his fellow scientists. He chose to fight, joined forces with Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss in the struggle that pitted them against popular Robert Oppenheimer and split the ranks of U.S. scientists for years afterward.
The Missing Idea. The behind-doors debate dragged on for half a year after the Russians exploded "Joe One." Then, in late January 1950, a shocking bit of intelligence decided the issue: German-born British Physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed that he had passed atomic secrets to Communist agents. Fuchs had been present at Los Alamos when Teller & Co. reviewed all that was known about thermonuclear reactions. Four days after Fuchs's confession, Harry Truman directed AEC to go ahead with the H-bomb.