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Edward Teller Passes Away At 95
Lord Prox writes "Edward Teller, one of the 20th Century's greats in physics, died Tuesday afternoon at his home in Stanford. He was 95." Newsforge.com also has one of the final interviews with Teller, who was "a principal architect of the hydrogen bomb, [and] passionate advocate of nuclear power and antimissile defense."
An H-bomb is just a tool and like any other tool it can be used for good (eg population control) or bad (eg. killing defenseless civilians) purposes. Remember thermonuclear devices don't kill, people do!
Speaking personally I sleep a lot sounder at night knowing that a hostile power somewhere in the world has a ICBM trained on the city I live in.
Thank you so much Edward Teller, what a wonderful legacy you have left for mankind.
I can't call you peaceniks, because you don't grasp human nature. Man's nature is to counter punch until someone falls.
Teller realized this --- he had to move Oppenhiemer away from the state of the art to proceed with a fusion weapon, otherwise, there was the possibility that Russia would have developed and used it first.
It seems as though most posters here don't mind dying as long as they aren't called evil. But for me, life is more than dying peacefully like a sheep to the slaughter. If I can save my nation by developing the most horrible weapon the planet has ever witnessed to balance world power and prevent a horrible attack on friends and neighbors, I'd sign up in a minute, no second thoughts or regrets. Stop being pansies, give up this old stupid game of fatalism and contrived self innocence, and do something to save your neighbors -- or at least recognize those who did exactly that.
Teller knew that someone else would eventually build the weapon, and it may as well have been the United States of America. There was much less chance of the u.s. using it as aggressor than Russia using it as an aggressor. Even as many here people claim that he has a special place in hell reserved for his evil soul, I would argue that would not be the case. Had it not been for Teller, Russia would have pinned the United States under communist rule after debilitating fusion weapon attacks for which we would have had no equal answer too. Millions of Americans in that era could have died, and the United States, the last democratic superpower of that age, would have fell, throwing the entire world under communist rule. Teller saved them.
Furthermore, I have never understood why people cannot grasp the concept of mutually assured destruction, and the enforced (if cold) peace it brought to a unrestful world order after WW2. The SD Initiative (whether or not we have operating hardware) bankrupted the soviet empire. If funding had not been cut, the project would have succeeded, but letting it run for a few years was plenty good to allow the Soviet Empire to spend itself into democratic oblivion (which has benefited the u.s. for the most part).
So folks, get real. You start typing on your keyboards, and a vacuum of clues form. Please reverse the trend. Cluelessness about things this important is unacceptable. Your fatalism and contrived self innocence could very well plunge the world into the nuclear war you believe Teller created the possibility of, when all Teller did was balance the scales.
One last point --- I'm sure replies will roll in declaring "well, the U.S. built the bomb first". Well, if you could actually devote your attention from the simplicities of computer gaming to the real world for a moment, it was pretty clear that the Germans were getting close to cracking the science behind the abomb, and they may not have stopped at a mere abomb, and possibly would have moved on to the H-Bomb. They were developing the bomber capability to drop such a weapon on NY even as Allied troops marched into Berlin. The cat was already out the bag, just that the U.S. trained it to do tricks first.
TurboD
I met Dr. Teller when he came into the Physics laboratory where I was working. The laboratory head described the work we were doing. We said a few inconsequential words to each other and shook hands. I think this was in 1972, or somewhere near that year.
Dr. Teller was the most frightening person I have ever met in my life. He certainly did nothing that was threatening; he was somewhat bored with the lab tour; he was very polite.
But, there was something about the lines on his face and his manner that was extremely unpleasant. Judging from his appearance, his inner conflict was fierce. When angry people act out their inner conflict, that makes them angrier. Unknowingly, I am sure, Dr. Teller had found a way to act out his anger, and, apparently, the destruction and unhappiness he brought to the world caused him unbelievable pain.
My reaction to Dr. Teller was completely spontaneous. No one had told me that Dr. Teller would be coming into my laboratory, although I knew he would be visiting some labs. It was obviously him, I had seen photos, but the photos showed very little of the true intensity of his existence. I had been working on resolving my own inner conflict, and I was very aware of how inner conflict twists people's bodies. Immediately when I saw him my consciousness was flooded with information that indicated a man was in pain.
Dr. Teller helped make the U.S. government what it is today. The U.S. government is, by some measures, the most violent government that has ever existed. The U.S. government has bombed more countries than any other, 24 since the end of the Second World War. The U.S. government has imprisoned a percentage of its citizens six times higher than other European nations or other nations of European background. The U.S. government maintains prisons of an extremely inhumane design, called SuperMax. (By other measures, other governments have been far more violent.)
The U.S. government killed about 2,000,000 Vietnamese in the Vietnam war; I was in the Air Force in Thailand; even pilots bombing Hanoi questioned why the U.S. government was there. Even pilots who believed that killing was a way to end violence questioned the Vietnam war. Colonel Broughton, if you are reading this, help me out here.
I know there are many people who read Slashdot for whom violence is entertainment. It is obvious that it is not pleasant to be told that when someone enjoys violence it means that person has an anger problem. But that is what I'm saying. Violence is motivated by inner conflict; inner conflict is always sickness.
Violence is never the answer to violence, it only increases violence. Someone named Jesus Christ said something like that 2,000 years ago; you may have heard of him. I'm not a religious person; I came to that understanding by investigating human inner conflict. I became interested in studying inner conflict because I wanted to resolve my own.
The terrorists were 100% wrong to bomb the United States. However, for years, the U.S. government has been giving more than $900 per person per year for every man, woman, and child in Israel to be used to kill Arabs. The 9/11 bombing killed 3,016 people. I don't have the figures for how many Arabs and Muslims have been killed by U.S. government policy toward Israel and Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, but I'm guessing the total was a lot more than 3,016 before 9/11/2001, maybe even far more than 10 times 3,016.
Many U.S. citizens act as though they think that the violence of the U.S. government is acceptable because the U.S. is somehow superior. Does it surprise anyone that the Arabs and Muslims don't like being killed? Does it surprise anyone that Arabs and Muslims don't always think they are inferior? Does it surprise anyone that, when Arabs see that the U.S. government thinks that violence is "justified", that reinforces in some of them their long history of belief in violence as a way to solve social problems?
Those relatively rich people wh