Edward Teller : The Real Dr. Strangelove

Many of the scientists involved in the earliest days of the nuclear arms race are either dead or no longer working. At 92, the Hungarian émigré Edward Teller is not only working but still at the forefront in shaping national and world defence strategies. Few men have had such a profound influence on the shape of the post-war worlds. He was involved at every stage of the building of the atomic bomb. In the years following the Second World War he was dubbed ‘the father of the H-bomb’ and was assailed as the mastermind of a ruinous arms race, the original Dr Strangelove, his effigy burned by students who branded him a war criminal. In the view of the Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, he was a ‘great man’ of vast imagination and one of the ‘most thoughtful statesmen of science’. In the view of another, Isadore Rabi, he has been ‘a danger to all that's important’ and ‘it would have been a better world without Teller’. Throughout his life he was at the centre of controversy, pursuing causes that drew the whole world deeper into the Cold War. In the process he alienated many of his scientific colleagues while providing the intellectual lead for politicians, the military and Presidents as they shaped Western policy towards the Soviets. Yet Sakharov, the Russian dissident and father of the Soviet H-bomb, declared that Teller had been quite right in his vigorous pursuit of American military power. In The Real Dr Strangelove, Peter Goodchild unravels the complex web of harsh early experiences, character flaws and personal and professional frustrations that lies behind the man Ronald Reagan described as ‘one of the bulwarks of American Freedom, a sterling example of what scientific knowledge, enlightened by moral sense, and a dedication to the principles of freedom and justice, can do to help all mankind.’