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

1958-08-01 / 8. szám

FRATERNITY

11

matics, and he was — as he puts it today in his thick aaccent — a “square”. After World War I, when defeated Hungary lost two-thirds of her pre-war territory, with the nation’s life disrupted and anti-Semitism rampant, Teller left for Germany to get a college education. He continued his advance studies in Denmark. When Hitler took power in 1933, Teller was at Göttingen, Germany, and he gladly grabbed at the offer of a lecturer’s post at London University. Two years later he moved on to the U. S. to take up a physics professor’s duties at George Washington University. Here he studied thermonuclear reactions in the stars, an undertaking that was to have momentous consequences: it led to the development of the H-bomb.

Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, U. S. scientists learned with alarm that physicists in Germany had brought about atomic fission. Physicist Leo Szilard, leaping in thought from laboratory fission to atomic bomb, together with Teller called upon Einstein to sign a petition to the President in order to start with an atomic research project. Roosevelt recognized the significance of the idea adn authorized to set up the Manhattan Engineering District project which produced history’s first atomic bomb. This was the turning point in Teller’s life — the start of his deep involvement in weaponry, war and politics.

For a few years, he worked with Szilard at Columbia on an atomic project. In 1943 he found himself at work in the Los Alamos A-Lab where U. S. scientists made history.

In August, 1949, years ahead of the most pessimistic U. S. predictions, the Russians achieved their first atomic explosion. At this critical moment, surprisingly enough, the Atomic Energy Commission’s influential General Advisory Board, chaired by physicist Oppenheimer, voted against any super bomb program. Teller had to make an agonizing decision: either to accept this verdict against his passionate conviction, or fight the decision of the Board. He chose the fight as every true Hungarian would — joined forces with Commissioner Strauss in the struggle which split the ranks of U. S. scientists for years, but finally fully justified Teller’s views. In 1950, physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed that he had passed atomic secrets to the Russians. Four days later, President Truman directed AEC to go ahead with the H-bomb.

The thermonuclear explosion which wiped the South Pacific islet of Elugelab off the face of the earth, was not a bomb. The first real H-bomb in the history was exploded by the Russians in 1953 at a time when Teller had come up also with the missing idea that the U. S. needed to make a practical H-bomb.

Since 1953 he has been associated with the University of California, at the AEC’s Livermore, Calif., fusion laboratory, where he turns his mind to the development of tactical-size, low-fallout thermonuclear weapons. In addition, he serves on the AEC’s Advisory Committee and the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Board, and carries on his own strenuous public-education campaign on the urgency of keeping ahead of Russia in science.