2010/19

Edward Teller: Memoirs (569p.)

Born a Hungarian Jew and educated in Germany, Edward Teller was just one of many Jewish scientists forced to flee Europe during the ascent of Hitler’s Nazi party and forced subsequently to set up shop in the US. In the US Teller became one of the key players on the Manhattan Project, which eventually led to the detonation of atom bombs (A-bomb) above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to the end of WWII.

Being a top physicist during WWII and the Cold War meant being at the frontier of science: Memoirs often reads as a who’s who of 20th century physics. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi are some of the other big names; many of the contributors to the Manhattan Project went on to win Nobel Prizes. Needless to say, working on nuclear weaponry wasn’t free of political and moral charge, and much of the book deals with Teller’s views and stances on these matters. Teller for instance was a strong advocate for the development of the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), whereas the majority of scientists by that time (the 50s) vehemently favored a ban on further nuclear testing (Pauling and Einstein to name just two).

On one hand, Memoirs is a fascinating journey through 20th century politics and science (justifying its 569 pages), on the other hand it isn’t particularly well written (although both are Hungarian Jews, Teller is no Koestler), the science will be too easy for the specialist but too difficult for the layman (the A-bomb is fission-driven, the H-bomb fusion-driven, and Teller will juggle both mechanisms in one sentence), and after subtracting the science, Teller the man turns out to be of lesser interest than Teller the scientist.

One significant event during my first months at Los Alamos deserves mention. During the summer of 1943, I read Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, which proved a major milestone in my thinking. … The novel, which takes place during the 1930s, describes what goes on in the mind of a communist accused of treason, and the exchanges between him and his interrogator. Koestler develops the arguments for communism as effectively as those against it. For a considerable part of the book, I was not sure whether the accused or the interrogator was the traitor to the cause. All that was clear was that no compromise could exist. For most of the book, Koestler presents both sides with equal force; but, by the end of the book, no ambiguity remains. The accused’s self-accusations are a lie, a sacrifice to the cause of communism. Darkness at Noon brought together and crystallized the objections to the methods of control used by Russian communism, which had been forming and accumulating in my mind for fifteen years. … Although Koestler was a native of Budapest, and close to a contemporary, I had no contact with him until a decade later, when John von Neumann, who was a friend of Koestler’s, introduced me to him. By then, I had read almost all Koestler’s books, including those he wrote about the history of science. Koestler, to my mind, was a remarkably thoughtful and honest person with an exceptional talent for writing.