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By Root 2150 0

to the secular arm; to burn them itself, it piously explained, would be wholly inconsistent with its Christian principles. Few of us would allow the Inquisition thus easily to wipe its hands clean of bloodshed; it knew quite well what would happen. Equally, where the technological application of scientific discoveries is clear and obvious - as when a scientist works on nerve gases - he cannot properly claim that such applications are ‘none of his business’, merely on the grounds that it is the military forces, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or kill. This is even more obvious when the scientist deliberately offers help to governments, in exchange for funds. If a scientist, or a philosopher, accepts funds from some such body as an office of naval research, then he is cheating if he knows his work will be useless to them and must take some responsibility for the outcome if he knows that it will be useful. He is subject, properly subject, to praise or blame in relation to any innovations which flow from his work.

An important case history is provided by the career of the Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller. Teller was marked at a young age by the Bela Kuhn communist revolution in Hungary, in which the property of middle-class families like his was expropriated, and by losing part of his leg in a streetcar accident, leaving him in permanent pain. His early contributions ranged from quantum mechanical selection rules and solid state physics to cosmology. It was he who chauffeured the physicist Leo Szilard to the vacationing Albert Einstein on Long Island in July 1939 - a meeting that led to the historic letter from Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt urging, in view of both scientific and political events in Nazi Germany, that the United States develop a fission, or ‘atomic’ bomb. Recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, Teller arrived at Los Alamos and promptly refused to cooperate -not because he was dismayed at what an atomic bomb might do, but just the opposite: because he wanted to work on a much more destructive weapon, the fusion, or thermonuclear, or hydrogen bomb. (While there is a practical upper limit on the yield or destructive energy of an atomic bomb, there is no such limit for a hydrogen bomb. But a hydrogen bomb needs an atomic bomb as trigger.)

After the fission bomb was invented, after Germany and Japan surrendered, after the war was over, Teller remained a persistent advocate of what was called ‘the Super’, specifically intended to intimidate the Soviet Union. Concern about the rebuilding, toughened and militarized Soviet Union under Stalin and the national paranoia in America called McCarthyism, eased Teller’s path. A substantial obstacle was offered, though, in the person of Oppenheimer, who had become the chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the post-war Atomic Energy Commission. Teller provided critical testimony at a government hearing, questioning Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States. Teller’s involvement is generally thought to have played a major role in the aftermath: although Oppenheimer’s loyalty was not exactly impugned by the review board, somehow his security clearance was denied, he was retired from the AEC, and Teller’s way to the Super was greased.

The technique for making a thermonuclear weapon is generally attributed to Teller and the mathematician Stanislas Ulam. Hans Bethe, the Nobel laureate physicist who headed the Theoretical Division at the Manhattan Project and who played a major role in the development of both the atomic and the hydrogen bombs, attests that Teller’s original suggestion was flawed, and that the work of many people was necessary to bring the thermonuclear weapon to reality. With fundamental technical contributions from a young physicist named Richard Garwin, the first US thermonuclear ‘device’ was exploded in 1952. It was too unwieldy to be carried by a missile or bomber; it just sat there where it was assembled and blew up. The first true hydrogen bomb was a Soviet invention exploded one year later. There has been debate