Edward Teller a Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist who was known to be the “father of the hydrogen bomb” participated in the first invention of an atomic bomb in 1945 and the first thermonuclear weapon, which is the hydrogen bomb.
Teller was born on 15 January 1908 in Budapest, Hungary. The Teller family was a Hungarian Jews in Austria. Teller studied in a Budapest school and took a degree in Chemical Engineering at the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. He then furthered his studies to earn a PhD in physical chemistry in 1930 at Munich and Leipzig. He explored the theory of molecular orbitals by doing a thesis on the hydrogen molecular ion. During the time he was in Munich doing his PhD, Teller fell under a moving car and lost his right foot, and he then survived with a prosthetic foot the rest of his life. In 1934, Teller was brought out of Germany by the Jewish Rescue Team and worked with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. In that same year, he married Augusta Maria, his wife.
With an astonishing knowledge in Physics, Teller was invited to the United States to become a professor at the George Washington University where he worked with George Gamow. In about a year, he was a citizen of the U.S, and he started exploring the use of nuclear energy. Teller’s most significant contribution of knowledge to the society was classifying the ways subatomic particles escape the nucleus during radioactive decay. In the year 1939, Niels Bohr produced a stunning report on the fission of uranium atom which attracted to call for scientists to develop weapons for the United States against Nazism and Teller then was devoted to developing nuclear weapons.
By 1941, he joined teams with Enrico Fermi to produce the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Later on, in 1943, Teller worked on theoretical studies on atomic bomb alongside Robert Oppenheimer. Besides Teller being known as “father of hydrogen bomb”, he was also known to be the key reason in the downfall of Robert Oppenheimer. When Robert Oppenheimer set up his secret Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, Teller was the first man to recruit. The Los Alamos assignment was supposed to build a fission bomb led by Robert Oppenheimer for the United States; Teller continued his own inquiries on much more powerful thermonuclear hydrogen fusion bomb. A feud erupted between them, and Robert Oppenheimer cut Teller loose from the core team to pursue his own interests. They then had a competition between them to win from the same government. Teller was about nuclear fusion bombs which could be an ecological disaster while Robert Oppenheimer was trying to miniaturize the bombs to reduce the damage. At war’s end, he wanted the U.S. government’s nuclear weapons development priorities shifted to the hydrogen bomb.
In 1946, Teller left Los Alamos and returned to the University of Chicago. When he thought he could not win the U.S government with his hydrogen bomb invention, Soviet Union conducted its first test of an atomic device in August 1949, and Teller was determined to build a hydrogen bomb by gaining support through a crash program. Still, he was not chosen to lead the project. Teller the joined a rival nuclear-weapon lab in California called Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.