Direct (short story), Contemporary reference (novel)
Edward Teller (born Teller Ede, January 15, 1908 - September 9, 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]
Literary Comment
In the short storyEdward Teller is arrested as part of the "Professors' Plot", but manages to convince Steele to spare him by promising an atomic bomb in three years. Steele agrees. While Teller is mentioned in the novel, Hyman Rickover is in charge of the atomic bomb project.
