Edward Teller (born Teller Ede, 1908-2003) was a Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist, and an early participant in the Manhattan Project. Of Jewish descent, Teller emigrated to the United States in the 1930s to escape the spread of Nazism in Europe. Unlike certain of his other colleagues, Teller remained strong advocate of the development of nuclear technology for military purposes for the remainder of his life. He is known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb".
Sam Yeager couldn't help but contrast men like Edward Teller and his colleagues, generally "dumpy foreigners with funny accents," with the "near-supermen" scientists found in the science fiction he read.[1]
In the late 1930s, Edward Teller engaged in subversive behavior and so was encamped as a wrecker by the GBI. When Captain Hyman Rickover was assigned the project to develop an atomic bomb, he received permission to use Teller and other encamped physicists within a special encampment to work on the bomb.[2] The project proved successful, so Teller and the others earned their freedom.[3]
Unfortunately, Edward Teller's decision to move to the United States nearly proved his undoing after Joe Steele became President. When Steele learned of the theoretical possibility of the atomic bomb in 1946, and that the weapon had been willfully kept from him by Albert Einstein, Steele rounded up several Jewish physicists, accused them of being a part of a "Professors' Plot", and executed them. Teller managed to convince Steele to spare him by promising a bomb in three years. Steele agreed.
Teller was able to produce the bomb in the agreed upon time. The United States used the bomb on Sapporo, North Japan during the Japanese War.
