The Politics of Annihilation

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The New York Sun

The irony of Peter Goodchild’s powerful new biography is that Edward Teller was no Dr. Strangelove at all.


The demented nuclear scientist of Stanley Kubrick’s heavy-handed satire, played with such sadistic pleasure by Peter Sellers, is an ex-Nazi who revels in visions of mass destruction. This Dr. Overkill believes only in the politics of annihilation.


Of course much the same has been said of Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, who opposed arms agreements and persuaded President Reagan to develop the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars” as it got termed), which critics decried as an instrument for destabilizing relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Much earlier, Teller had destroyed his friendships in the scientific community when he testified against Robert Oppenheimer, now seen by many as a martyr of the nuclear age, a conscience-stricken man who believed that his participation in the nuclear bomb research program at Los Alamos had helped transform men of science into world shatterers.


The case against Teller is the stuff of comic books and melodrama – although Mr. Goodchild, a deft biographer, shows that elements of Teller’s own melodramatic personality contributed to the picture of him as a thermonuclear zealot. Teller was paranoid, seeing conspiracies (usually Communist) everywhere, and opposition to his views not as honest disagreements but as sabotage.


While Mr. Goodchild does not discount Teller’s failings, his conclusion is that Teller is beginning to emerge as a figure more important than Oppenheimer. The difference between the two men is that while the latter believed that nuclear scientists had “known sin” the former believed they had “known power.” A confused Oppenheimer – and many of his colleagues – blanched at the destructive power science had released and acted as though this new energy could be renounced. Teller pursued the more courageous and wise course. He mastered, as Mr. Goodchild puts it, the “interface between the scientific and the political.”


Born in 1908 in Hungary, Teller grew up in the monstrous maw of the Russian Revolution. “Within my first eleven years,” he wrote, “I had known war, patriotism, communism, revolution, anti-Semitism, fascism and peace.” The Hungary of Teller’s early days experienced the brutality of both fascist and communist regimes. When Teller read fellow Hungarian Arthur Koestler’s exposure of Stalinist tyranny in “Darkness at Noon” (1940), it only confirmed what he knew firsthand. Negotiation or collaboration with terrorist regimes is impossible. Only military power and the threat of overwhelming force can preserve human integrity.


Oppenheimer and co., aghast at the enormity of nuclear weapons, desperately tried to believe that the United States could negotiate its way out of an arms race. Rejecting this view a priori, Teller understood that his fellow scientists would call him a fascist. His isolation in the scientific community is heartrending to read. Although Mr. Goodchild does not say so, Teller’s op ponents were the same kind of people who spent years arguing Alger Hiss’s innocence and covering up for their own Communist friends – as Oppenheimer did when lying to the government about his brother.


Ostracized by his contemporaries, Teller turned to younger scientists, to a Cold War generation without their predecessors sentimentality about leftist causes. Teller understood that nuclear weaponry had to be part of a political arsenal. The idea that the United States could share its knowledge with the Soviet Union, or reach agreements that could be verifiable, seemed fanciful to him. After all, the Soviet Union had recruited scientist spies at Los Alamos to supply knowledge developed before the first nuclear bomb was exploded.


What kind of world did Oppenheimer think he was living in? Teller wondered. That Teller had to seek political allies in the military and in the government because he remained virtually alone in the scientific community in his understanding of the world is painfully apparent in this well-documented biography. Mr. Goodchild does not cite one conversation, one letter, from any colleague that demonstrates any significant understanding of Teller’s position.


Did Teller exaggerate the Soviet threat? Yes. Was he ambitious and resentful of the suave and politic Oppenheimer? Certainly. Did Teller tend to take more than his share of credit for the hydrogen bomb? Perhaps, although Mr. Goodchild believes that Teller was on his way to a breakthrough when his colleague Stanislaus Ulam made the calculations that led to his exclamation, “I found a way to make it work.” Similarly, Teller’s 2001 autobiography tends to supply details that the facts do not always support, in Mr. Goodchild’s view. But such criticisms, while important in taking Teller’s measure as a man, do nothing to undermine the soundness of his position.


The ascetic-looking Oppenheimer never seemed able to reckon with the political consequences of his actions, which had the effect of creating a kind of moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union based on the fact that they both possessed weapons of mass destruction. The bulldog like Teller, on the other hand, never shied away from affirming his side’s moral superiority.


Indeed, the Teller-Oppenheimer matchup reminds me of the Chambers-Hiss trial – although Teller accused Oppenheimer not of treason but of irresponsibility: It was in that sense that this sentimental lefty was a security risk. Both pairs of men began as friends and collaborators, but their estrangement became inevitable as Chambers and Teller developed anti-Communist political and moral positions that found a home almost exclusively among Conservatives. Even Cold Warriors, like John “Missile Gap” Kennedy, shied away from Teller.


That Teller’s trajectory led to Ronald Reagan’s SDI seems, in retrospect, inevitable. If nuclear weapons were defensive and never intended for a first strike, then the idea of MAD (mutually assured destruction) was flawed. With the development of lasers and other technology, Teller believed missile defense systems could remove the threat of nuclear war forever. Impossible, say most scientists today – but then that is what Oppenheimer said about the “Super,” the hydrogen bomb that Teller envisioned in 1942 and that took him and others 10 years to develop.


It is beyond my competence to critique SDI, but after reading this biography I am loathe to reject out of hand Edward Teller’s own belief that only by the exercise of new power and forms of energy can we save the world. The costs of renouncing the pursuit of power are too terrible to imagine.


The New York Sun

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