Edward Teller, one of the great intellects of the twentieth century, died on Tuesday at age 95. Fox News has an obituary. It’s not bad although the reporter obviously has a rather negative attitude about Dr. Teller. These lines are some of the best of the article:
In an interview in 2001, Teller showed his old fighting spirit, delivering the two-word endorsement — “High time!” — to President George W. Bush’s decision to pull out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia to work on a missile defense shield.
“So many times I have been asked whether I regret having worked on the atomic and hydrogen bombs,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics.” “My answer is no. I deeply regret the deaths and injuries that resulted from the atomic bombings, but my best explanation of why I do not regret working on weapons is a question: What if we hadn’t?”
I was my good fortune to attend a lecture by the good doctor some years ago. Teller was an idea factory through his entire life and was a rivetting speaker. I never knew the man personally, but I know people who worked with him in the national labs. He was a forceful leader and did not like obstacles or excuses. The future was there to reach for and he was fully prepared to reach as far as possible.
We owe him a debt of gratitude.
It is sad that Fox tends to recruit the same “school of journalism” people that the other media companies do (if only Fox could be the organization that the left claims it is).
I agree that Dr Teller was a great man. He reminds me of the 1950’s view of the future with nuclear space craft and so on – he must have been depressed to live into these antitechnology times.
I remember him arguing for “nuclear depth charges” i.e. for anti ballistic missiles that would not have to HIT their targets but just go off near them (rather less difficult). “Fall out” from such explosions would be minimal and incomming missiles would be destroyed.
On the Japanese bombings Dr Teller had doubts at the time (being sympathetic to the idea that perhaps Japanese government people should be invited to observe what happened to an uninhabited island that was nuked, to see if they would surrender without cities being destroyed)
However, Saint Oppenheimer (spelling) was very keen for the Japanese to be nuked – something his supporters seem to forget.
I suspect when Teller asks what if we hadn’t, he is referring to the fact that the Nazis were themselves working feverishly in the same direction. The trouble with that argument is that we don’t know if the Nazis would have ever used such a weapon. Indeed, I think the threat was unlikely by the start of 1944.
It is also a fact that although chemical weapons had been used in the first World War, they were not resorted to in the second. So there have to be doubts even that Hitler would have gone ahead if he had had a deliverable nuke in time.
I believe Dr Teller was the model for Dr Strangelove; and as far as I can recall, Oppenheimer regretted Hiroshima and Nagasaki all his life.
I recommend reading John Hershey’s “Hiroshima” — a sobering book and a brilliant journalistic achievement.
I think there are some kinds of warfare that truly are beyond the pale.
Wrong on most counts. If the US had not developed and used the bomb when it did, the invasion of Japan would have cost the lives of a half million American soldiers by contemporary estimates (made based on Okinawa) and a very large chunk (many millions) of the total Japanese civilian population. The war would have lasted at least until 1947 and the Soviets would have invaded from the North, leading to a partitioned Japan. Without the object lesson of the two bomb sites many of us believe an all out nuclear war would have broken out in the 50’s between the US and the USSR.
Teller was not even a concievable model for Dr. Strangelove. There is simply no way Stanley Kubrick would represent an expatriot Hungarian Jew as a zeig-heiling German accented nutcase.
I read Hersey’s book when I was in my early teens, along with “The Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki” and USGPO “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons”.
Yes, I am entirely familiar with the argument that there was no other way to avoid huge and pointless casualties against a suicidally stubborn enemy. I was born in 1941; my father was killed in Normandy 1944, my uncle survived a Japanese PoW camp (barely, and never the same again afterwards). But I don’t believe the argument can
be proven.
Secondly, a quick Google of the terms Dr Strangelove/Edward Teller will underpin my recollection of the late physicist as a very possible model, one referred to so often in print that I am surprised you are so dismissive.
After all, Strangelove was played by Peter Sellers, who was Jewish.
The characteriation doesn’t mean Kubrick thought Teller was a Nazi.
Interesting additional speculation at http://www.krusch.com/kubrick/Q06.html.
This considers Henry Kissinger, Wernher von Braun and Teller as the three main Strangelove suspects favoured by film historians; but it prefers Herman Kahn of the Rand Corporation (though I imagine he was Jewish too).
As to your scenario of the dreadful alternative you paint to dropping the Bomb (twice), well you may believe that if you wish, but that is conjecture, not proof.
The end does not justify the means. That way lies al-Qaeda and Osama.
Dave F.-
Equivocating between allied actions taken to end the second world war and Al Queda is silly. War is hell, as a famous general once said. The object is to win as quickly as possible by destroying the enemy’s destructive capability. People are ultimately responsible fortheir governments. The US was attacked. The best measure of US actions is how the defeated were treated by the victors not the actions taken to defeat them. In the just war scenario the object is to win, as quickly as possible while minimizing the damage to our side. Okinawa, Iwo, etc. made a great case for the nuclear option. Talk to anyone who was there.