Edward Teller (January 15, 1908-September 9, 2003) was born in Budapest, Hungary, to attorney Max Teller and his wife Ilona Deutsch, a pianist. Otherwise agnostic, he recalled his family “celebrated one holiday (Yom Kippur) when we all fasted.” He was married in a Calvinist Church to Augusta Maria “Mici” Harkanyi.
Educated in chemistry and physics at Karlsruhe, Munich, and Leipzig, he left Germany after Hitler came to power. He joined the Manhattan Project in 1943 when Robert Oppenheimer was developing the atom bomb. Teller led a division seeking to develop an even mightier bomb. After the Soviet Union detonated an A-bomb in 1949, President Harry Truman ordered the development of a hydrogen bomb, which Teller and Stanislaw Ulam are credited with designing, although each denigrated the contribution of the other.
Teller testified in 1954 to the Atomic Energy Commission that Oppenheimer was a loyal American citizen, but too erratic to be given security clearance. Teller helped establish the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory and its Space Sciences Laboratory. He advised Israel in its development of a nuclear program.
Tomorrow (January 16): Norman Podhoretz
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SDJW condensation of a Wikipedia article