Fraternity-Testvériség, 1958 (36. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)

1958-08-01 / 8. szám

10

FRATERNITY

LÁSZLÓ L. ESZENYI:

AMERICAN HUNGARIANS OF WHOM WE ARE PROUD

There are no other nationals in the United States who contributed nearly so much to the deadly nuclear race toward the security of this country than Hungarians. Without the famous Hungarian atomic team — Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, János Neumann and Jenő Wigner — American research could hardly have arrived at the result leading to the development of the atomic bomb which in Hiroshima and Nagasaki put a dramatic end to the war. In today’s cold war, when the survival of our way of life is at stake, a scientific discovery such as the H-bomb carries more weight than hundreds of divisions. The idea of that bomb — still top secret — is so ingenious that only two men in the world could have thought of it, and we are proud to mention that one of them was a Hungarian whose life we are going to introduce in the following article.

★ ★ ★

III.

EDWARD TELLER, “FATHER OF THE H-BOMB”

(Condensed from the Reader’s Digest — February, 1957, issue)

The Sputnik I that came as a shocking surprise to the U. S. public, found prepared Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born nuclear physicist commonly called in the scientific world as “the father of the H-bomb.” Looking beyond the obvious dangers of the Soviet advances in the particular fields of military technology, Teller finds even more worrisome menace in Russia’s massive national program of science education and basic research. “The science of today”, he says, “is the technology of tomorrow. Many people are afraid that we will be attacked by Russia. I am not free of such worry. But I think the Russians can conquer us without fighting, through a growing scientific and technological preponderance. Imagine, for instance, that Russians control some day the weather on a large scale and are able to change rainfall over Russia which might very well influence the rainfall in our country in an adverse manner.”

Edward Teller was born in 1908 into a Jewish family with culture and money. In his high school days in Budapest he excelled in mathe