Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Edward Teller and the Development of the H-Bomb

Starting point is 00:00:00 During the Second World War, the United States established the highly secret Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb based on nuclear fission. While the Manhattan Project was ultimately successful, some in the program were thinking bigger. They felt that the explosion from an uncontrolled fission reaction could be used to create an even larger explosion using nuclear fusion. One man in particular felt that such a device was necessary and spearheaded the efforts after the war to develop a fusion-based hydrogen bomb. Learn more about Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Starting point is 00:00:48 What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. understand Edward Teller, you need to understand where he came from and the circumstances he grew up under, as they influenced his worldview for the rest of his life. Edward Teller was born in 1908 in Budapest, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was born to a Jewish family with a mother

Starting point is 00:01:32 who was a pianist and a father who was an attorney. He grew up in a very particular time and place. He was part of a generation of highly talented Hungarian academics who had profoundly impacted the world of science. This group of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals became known as the Martians because of their enormous impact on physics and mathematics in the first half of the 20th century. The term Martian came from the Hungarian physicist Leo Salard, who, when asked where all the aliens were responded, quote, they're already here among us. They're just calling themselves Hungarians. Teller's formative years in Hungary were lived under communism during the brief rule of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, and then under the Hungarian military leader Miklos Horthy,

Starting point is 00:02:17 who was closely allied to Adolf Hitler. In 1926, Teller left a study in Germany because of quotas placed on Jewish students in Hungarian universities. He attended the University of Karlsruhe, where he got a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. However, a visiting professor named Herman Mark got him interested in physics and the burgeoning world of quantum physics. He transferred to the University of Munich to study physics, where he suffered an injury jumping off a streetcar that left him with a limp for the rest of his life. He continued on to the University of Leipzig, where he received his Ph.D. in physics, studying under his advisor, Werner Heisenberg. He continued to work in Germany, but with the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Germany was no

Starting point is 00:02:59 longer a safe place for Jewish academics. He moved to England and then to Copenhagen to work with Niels Bohr, and finally was offered a position at George Washington University in Washington, in D.C. in 1935. While in the U.S. Teller made several profound advancements. He was the co-discoverer of the John Teller effect, which is a phenomenon in chemistry where certain molecules distort their shape to lower their energy and become more stable when they have specific arrangements of electrons. He was also instrumental in developing the Brunauer-emitt-Teller theory, which explains the physical absorption of gas molecules on a solid surface. In March 1941, almost nine months before the United States entered the Second World War, Edward Teller became a naturalized citizen of the United

Starting point is 00:03:43 States. In 1942, he was involved in many low-level meetings that were precursors to the Manhattan Project. He met with Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize winner who created the first controlled nuclear reaction. During their discussion of the possibility of creating an atomic bomb, Fermi made an offhand comment that it might be possible to create an even larger bomb by using a fission reaction to produce an even bigger fusion reaction. Teller was initially skeptical but became fascinated with the idea. It was a conversation that would have profound implications for Edward Teller and for the entire world. Teller was later invited to a seminar in Berkeley organized by Robert Oppenheimer, which was a prelude to the Manhattan Project. During the seminar,

Starting point is 00:04:30 Teller kept trying to change the discussion from the creation of a fission bomb to that of a fusion bomb, which was then dubbed the Super. Teller was invited to join the Manhattan Project and moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1943, and was signed to the theoretical division. He was passed over by Oppenheimer to run the division, which was a snub that he would never forget. He was given various assignments to see how different bomb proposals would work,

Starting point is 00:04:57 absolutely none of which panned out. But despite his work on options for a fission bomb, he continued to advocate for a fusion bomb. He was eventually transferred to a group to work on a fusion bomb, which came to absolutely nothing during the war. An interesting side note, when the Trinity test, the first atomic bomb explosion was conducted on July 16, 1945, Edward Teller was one of the only physicists to actually watch the explosion with protective eyewear.

Starting point is 00:05:26 Everyone else laid down with their backs turned as instructed. He later said the detonation, quote, was as if I pulled open the curtain in a dark room and broad daylight streamed in. After the war, Teller continued his interest in developing a fusion bomb. However, he soon realized that his initial idea for designing such a device wouldn't work. Nonetheless, he still advocated research for a fusion bomb. After the war, the Soviet Union began installing puppet governments in Eastern European countries, including Hungary, where he still had many family members living.

Starting point is 00:06:00 What changed the fortunes of the fusion bomb was the 1949 test. detonation of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union. President Truman needed to respond and announced the development of a program to create a hydrogen bomb. Here I should briefly describe the difference between an atomic bomb using nuclear fission and a hydrogen bomb using nuclear fusion. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomic bombs that used an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction. Refined uranium or plutonium undergoes an uncontrolled reaction where an atom splice. causing neutrons to be released, which split other atoms, which release more neutrons, and so on. A fusion bomb is based on fusing together lighter elements, particularly hydrogen.

Starting point is 00:06:47 This is the same process that occurs inside the sun. However, to achieve fusion, you need very high temperatures and pressure. One of the only things that can produce such temperatures is an atomic bomb. The principle behind a hydrogen bomb is to use a fission explosion to create the conditions for hydrogen nuclei to fuse together. This is also known as a thermonuclear explosion, thermo-meaning heat, and nuclear from the atomic nucleus. Many leading physicists who had worked in the Manhattan project didn't want to work on the hydrogen bomb because they didn't think it was feasible. Teller's own early ideas on a fusion bomb were shown not to work. Teller had under

Starting point is 00:07:29 underestimated the amount of tritium necessary, an isotope of hydrogen. Nonetheless, he was still the fusion bomb's biggest advocate. The big breakthrough in the development of the hydrogen bomb came in March of 1951. Teller and a Polish-American mathematician named Stanislaw Ulam came up with a revolutionary design. It was a two-stage design using a separate fission explosion and then using x-rays created in an atomic fission blast to compress the hydrogen. To this day, there's still controversy surrounding the Teller Ulam design. Both Teller and Ulam for years took the majority of the credit, and other physicists have supported one or the other.

Starting point is 00:08:11 Regardless of who the primary contributor was, both Teller and Ulam acknowledged the work of the other. The Teller Ulam design became the design for hydrogen bombs, and it's believed that it has been the primary design for everyone ever made sense. There are elements of the 1951 design, which are still classified today. When the time came to turn the theory into reality, Teller was passed over once again to lead the project because of the controversy surrounding the credit for the Teller Ulam design, and because of his generally prickly personality.

Starting point is 00:08:44 Once the theoretical problem had been solved, it was simply a matter of engineering. Teller felt that the bomb could be ready by July 1952, but Marshall Holloway, the director of the program, selected over Teller, felt that it couldn't be done until November. Teller eventually left Los Alamos and became one of the co-founders of the Livermore Labs, which is today operated by the Department of Energy and is the primary research center for nuclear weapons development. The end result was the Ivy Mike Test, which took place on November 1st, 1952, on the Iwanitak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

Starting point is 00:09:20 It was the world's first thermonuclear explosion, and at that point, the largest man-made explosion in human history. The hydrogen bomb was indeed significantly more powerful than the atomic bombs which preceded it. The detonation was the equivalent of 10.4 million tons of TNT, or 700 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Unlike the Trinity Test, which was kept secret for months, the Ivy Mike test quickly made headlines.

Starting point is 00:09:52 The media began referring to Edward Teller with a title that stuck with him throughout his life, the father of the hydrogen bomb. This gave Teller a much higher public profile than he had before. In addition of the controversy surrounding credit for the development of the H-bomb, Teller stepped into even more controversy in 1954. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, was subject to a security clearance hearing by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Oppenheimer had voiced opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb, and he had been associated with known communists in the past. This was now a much bigger deal in the middle of the Cold War and McCarthyism than it was during the middle of World War II. Teller was the only scientist to

Starting point is 00:10:36 testify in favor of revoking Oppenheimer's security status. If you read his actual testimony, it actually wasn't that damning. And if he hadn't testified at all, Oppenheimer probably still would have had a security clearance revoked. Many people think that Teller's testimony had to do with being passed over for the head of the theoretical team all the way back during the Manhattan Project. Nonetheless, it made Edward Teller a pariah amongst many in the physics community. Many of his friends refused to speak to him or even shake his hand at conferences. However, his status amongst the military and the government only grew. In 1958, he became the director at Livermore Labs, which put him front and center in influencing American defense policy. Even after stepping down as

Starting point is 00:11:22 director of the lab in 1960, he remained highly influential for decades. That year, 1958, he was signatory to a position to increase U.S. defense spending by $3 billion. And this was at a time when $3 billion was actually a lot of money. His opposition to all things communist resulted in opposition to any sort of compromise with the Soviets on anything related to nuclear weapons. He opposed the partial test ban treaty, the treaty on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, and and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. In the 1980s, he came out as one of the staunchest defenders of the Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars. He was also an advocate for the non-military use of nuclear weapons, including detonating them to create artificial harbors in Alaska,

Starting point is 00:12:09 using them to try to weaken hurricanes, extracting oil sands in Alberta, and even detonating them on the moon to analyze the dust that was kicked up. He even proposed the development of a one-gigoton nuclear weapon, far greater than any ever built to deflect an asteroid. And you probably also wouldn't be shocked to find that he was a supporter of Project Orion, which wanted to launch spaceships using nuclear weapons. But he was also one of the first people to have raised the issue of global warming from the burning of fossil fuels. He first brought it up in 1957 and actually mentioned it at an address of the American Petroleum Institute in 1959. Edward Teller's cavalier advocacy for nuclear weapons throughout his entire life for almost every possible use ran counter

Starting point is 00:12:57 to almost everyone else in the world of physics. Edward Teller died in 2003 at the age of 95. Before his death, he was interviewed by Esquire magazine. In it, he was asked if he had any regrets about developing the most devastating weapon the world had ever known. He responded by saying, quote, that I spend my life working on weapons, I have not the least regret. I succeeded. I believe that by building the H-bomb, I contributed to winning the Cold War without bloodshed. I am not overly modest. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me

Starting point is 00:13:47 put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Edward Teller and the Development of the H-Bomb

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