My Brush with Greatness: Edward Teller (1908-2003)

Today would have been the 106th birthday of nuclear physicist Edward Teller, who has often been called the "father of the hydrogen bomb."  Teller was also an advocate against government secrecy who probably would have relished the opportunity to engage in the debate about the NSA that has resulted from the revelations of Edward Snowden.  He was also a principal advocate for the development of what came to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars."

When Teller died in 2003, I wrote an article for a local Charlottesville newspaper, The Hook, which at the time had been running a series called "My Brush with Greatness."  My piece appeared as a back-of-the-book commentary piece.

For some reason, I have not previously rescued this piece for re-publication in this space, although it has been available on The Hook's archives.  (Sadly, The Hook ceased publication late last year, so how long and how available its archives will be remains an open question. The photo of Teller and me, reproduced below, that accompanied the article is already missing from the paper's web site.)

This article appeared in the print edition of The Hook on September 18, 2003.

Edward Teller: My brush with greatness

While the entertainment world reels from the loss of Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash, and John Ritter, the world stage will long remember the controversial cold warrior bomb-builder Edward Teller, whose September 9 death got lost in the shuffle. One local remembers the man who built the horrifying "super." –editor

RICHARD SINCERE

It would be a lie for me to say that Edward Teller and I were friends. It would even be a stretch to call us acquaintances, although we were colleagues on one side of a vital public debate at the height of the Cold War.

Edward Teller and Rick Sincere, c. 1983

The best I can say is that Edward Teller and I crossed paths on about a dozen occasions in the 1980s, participating in conferences together, and engaging in short but substantive conversations on nuclear weapons policy, U.S.-Soviet relations, and international politics.

Teller, who died on September 9 at his home in California at the age of 95, was known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb." He participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, and for many years was head of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which pursued fundamental research in nuclear physics and applied sciences.

My most memorable encounter with Teller was not the first one, in 1981. Rather, it was one of the last meetings we had, on November 16, 1988, at the Washington Hilton Hotel in the nation's capital.

On that occasion, Edward Teller, the American "father of the hydrogen bomb," met for the first time Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet "father of the hydrogen bomb." Sakharov, who as a dissident and human rights activist was forced by the Soviet regime to live in internal exile for many years, was in Washington on his first trip to the United States. (This was in the era of glasnost and perestroika-­ openness and reform-­ ushered in by former Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev.)

The meeting between the two famous physicists was arranged by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think-tank for which I worked at the time. On that night, Teller was to receive the Shelby Cullom Davis Award for "integrity and courage in public life" at a dinner attended by some 750 people in government, business, the academy, and journalism. A few days before the dinner, we learned that Sakharov would be in town and that he had a desire to meet Teller.

As the crowd mingled at the cocktail reception several floors below, the president of the Center, Ernest Lefever, and I waited anxiously for Teller and Sakharov to arrive. Teller came first, accompanied by the massive walking stick he always carried with him. The three of us made some small talk when there was a knock at the door: Sakharov, accompanied by a Russian-English interpreter.

Andrei Sakharov and Edward Teller

They greeted each other like old friends, although the two had never met before. They sat together on a sofa and chatted amiably about the issues that motivated them: international stability, human rights, and, above all, nuclear physics. They spoke in soft tones, and we left them alone. What passed between them that night, in private, was known only to Teller and Sakharov.

Teller's career was a storied one, and he earned both scorn and accolades in his long life. Never one to mince words, he criticized government officials regardless of political party or ideology when he thought they were on the wrong path. He led a lonely but articulate crusade against U.S. government secrecy, arguing that it was pointless to classify, for example, reports on nuclear weapons research, because the Soviets were able to obtain these reports by stealth and espionage anyway.

The only people left in the dark were American voters, who were then unable to make sensible, fully informed decisions about public policy.

This approach was consonant with Teller's lifelong trust in democracy. In 1950 he wrote: "It is not the scientist's job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives."

Teller earned the enmity of "peaceniks," appeasers, nuclear freezers, left-wing ideologues, and Communist fellow travelers. In the 1980s, he was hounded by operatives of Lyndon LaRouche's political cult, who heckled him at public speaking events and tried to embarrass him for his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the anti-missile project known derisively as "Star Wars."

It was said that the only human casualty of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 was Edward Teller: So exhausted by traveling around the country, speaking out calmly against the Chicken Littles who declared Three Mile Island a disaster, Teller suffered a heart attack and was incapacitated for several weeks.

Teller, of course, had his admirers, too-­ not least among them those who felt that a strong defense posture was necessary in the face of Soviet expansionism, and especially those who felt that true defensive strategies (including civil defense programs and anti-missile programs like SDI) were morally, strategically, and politically imperative.

On that November night in 1988, President Ronald Reagan said that Teller was "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." The President added that Teller was "one of the giants of American science, and one of the bulwarks of American freedom."

Richard Sincere is co-editor of Promise or Peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative, and author of Civil Defense: A Moral, Political, and Strategic Approach, both published in 1986 by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as well as of other books.

It wasn't until I decided to write this blog post that I discovered how Edward Teller shared a birthday with my own father and also with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Same day, different years in all three cases, however.)

March 23, 1983 - Ronald Reagan Launches the Strategic Defense Initiative

It is hard to believe it has been three decades since President Ronald Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative, which quickly earned the dismissive sobriquet "Star Wars" (after the George Lucas films of the same name).

Reagan's introduction was modest and unexpected, coming at the end of a televised address to the nation on the general theme of national security and the defense budget then being considered by Congress.

The Strategic Defense Initiative (or SDI) was not without precedent, however. Winston Churchill had called for defensive weapons systems as early as the 1930s, in the run-up to World War II. One result of the strategic defense debate and subsequent research in that era was radar, which probably saved Britain from total destruction by the Luftwaffe.

There had also been talk about strategic defense from the beginning of the Atomic Age, with pro- and anti- sides alternating pre-eminence from time to time.

In the 1960s, defensive strategic systems were debated and set aside as destabilizing to the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). As I wrote in the 1986 book, Promise or Peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative (coedited with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Marin Strmecki, and Peter Wehner) U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara

also rejected a U.S. strategic defense system because it would be easily countered by Moscow. The Soviet Union would be forced to respond with an offensive buildup, which would mean that "the risk of a Soviet nuclear attack would not be further decreased" and, if deterrence failed, "the damage to the United States from a Soviet nuclear attack would not be reduced in any meaningful sense."

To those following strategic issues in the early 1980s, the substance of Reagan's "Star Wars speech" was not so surprising, even if the timing of it was. Reagan himself was urged by Edward Teller, known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb," to promote and initiate defensive systems as part of the overall U.S. national security strategy. Retired General Daniel O. Graham had been pushing a concept he called "High Frontier," which used off-the-shelf, kinetic technology to knock incoming missiles out of the sky.

In summarizing and introducing an excerpt from Reagan's SDI speech in Promise or Peril, I wrote:

With President Reagan's address to the nation on March 23, 1983, the Strategic Defense Initiative became the focus of the U.S. debate over strategic policy. Although much of the speech was devoted to resisting uts in his defense budget, in his conclusion the President offered an alternative to traditional U.S. nuclear strategy. "Wouldn't it be better to save lives than to avenge them?" he asked. Although "deterrence of aggression through the promise of retaliation" had worked well, Reagan rejected the idea of indefinitely basing U.S. policy on the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction.

In calling for this shift, he advocated, not simply a limited defense of U.S. strategic forces, but a total population defense so that "free people could live secure in the knowledge that ... we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies." The President challenged the scientific community, "those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete."

The rhetoric of Reagan's speech echoes that of Winston Churchill ... during the British air defense debate of the 1930s.

Thirty years on, for both his domestic and foreign policies, Ronald Reagan is remembered by local Republican parties through annual celebratory dinners. The next one coming up in Virginia is in Charlottesville on April 7, just two weeks after the anniversary of what is known not just derisively but also affectionately as the "Star Wars speech."