The Father of the H-Bomb Edward Teller, Interviewed in 1999

The following column is adapted from "The Michael Savage Show" podcast, available for download on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts are heard.

In today’s “Michael Savage Show” podcast, I replay the most important interview of my radio career.

Edward Teller was among the greatest minds in human history. Teller was a big part of Reagan's star wars program, which he talks about.

Also I asked him, "Do you believe in God?" Fascinating what he had to say about religion.

Who was Edward Teller?

Teller was a controversial man.

He's one of the giants in the history of physics but was turned into a villain by the cancel culture movement, run by the communist socialist left wing of that time.

Why?

Because he believed in strong national defense.

He had fled Hitler, and then he had to flee communism. He came to America and he believed in a strong national defense.

He became one of the architects of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program.

Edward Teller was born in Hungary. He was a theoretical physicist and the father of the hydrogen bomb.

Teller, along with other Jewish refugees from Hitler, helped urge President Roosevelt to develop an atomic bomb program in the United States.

The greatest minds of our time in this world, they saved America.

So Teller comes here, joins the Los Alamos laboratory in 1943 as group leader in the theoretical physics division.

And he becomes interested in the possibility of developing an H-bomb after Enrico Fermi suggested that a weapon based on nuclear fusion be used to set off an even larger nuclear efficient reaction than nuclear fission which was the original bomb.

He kept pushing his ideas for a fusion weapon while other physicists were very skeptical that such a device would actually work.

In 1950 Truman approved the hydrogen bomb program. Teller and his colleagues came up with the first workable design for a fusion device in 1951.

A year later the U.S. tested the device in the South Pacific. It was roughly a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Its design still remains classified to this day.

Teller had an interesting early life. He was a prodigy as a young boy, and belonged to a remarkable generation of Hungarian Jewish people who grew up in Budapest.

They all went to the same school. They produced seven of the 20th Century's most influential physicists and mathematicians.

Aside from teller, they included the mathematician John Von Neumann and the physicist Leo Szilard.

His father was unhappy when Teller announced he wanted to be a mathematician.

Teller said, “My father said I couldn't make a living that way, but I cheated. I studied chemistry and mathematics. After two years, my father gave up and told me to study what I want.”

This was a time when mathematics and physics were still considered to be one field and the place to study it was in Germany.

While in Germany, he was run over by a trolley car in an accident and lost a foot. And for the rest of his life, he wore a prosthesis, a false leg, leaving him with a slight limp.

Think about this for a minute. Think about the victim culture in America today, where someone gets a broken hangnail, or someone's uncomfortable with a word someone says about their race or their sex or their agenda or their hair color, they sue somebody.

Here's a guy who loses a leg in a trolley car accident, wears a prosthetic device. And he goes on to receive a PhD at the age of 22 from the university of Leipzig in 1930.

So finally, Mr. Teller was forced to flee Germany with the rise of the Nazis.

Thank God these Jews escaped. He emigrated to the United States in 1938, and he took a position at the then great George Washington University.

By the late 1930s, physicists in France, Germany, and Britain, and the U S were moving toward the ability to break atoms and release the huge energy stored within them.

And this was all following Einstein's famous equation relating energy to the speed of light. The great fear among the non German scientists was that Germany would be the first in harnessing this power for a weapon.

Teller and other physicists enlisted the help of Einstein who served them tea and then signed the letter that Szilard had written to President Roosevelt about the German threat of developing an atomic weapon.

And that began the steps that led to Los Alamos. Teller was one of the first to arrive at Los Alamos in April of 1943, and he helped Oppenheimer recruit and organize the Manhattan project.

But Teller didn't completely trust Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer's wife, brother, sister-in-law and a former lover were communists and belonged to a number of communist front organizations.

In the investigation of Oppenheimer, most of the scientists called to testify supported Oppenheimer and disputed that Oppenheimer was a security risk. Teller was one of the few exceptions.

Now you understand why he was exiled at the end of his generally complimentary testimony about Oppenheimer.

Listen to what he said about Oppenheimer as to whether Oppenheimer would be a security risk. These are 24 important words, teller summarizes 24 words that triggered one of the most bitter feuds in the history of American physics.

He said:

“I feel that I would like to see the vital interest of this country in hands, which I understand better and therefore trust more.”

Oppenheimer lost his security clearance and retired back to Princeton in disgrace.

But Teller wound up an exile. He was exiled in physics. He was exiled from the scientific community.

He was hated and reviled for years, while Oppenheimer would take on the status of a folk hero because he was a leftist. But Teller understood the danger we were in.

Later in his life, he opposed the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) on grounds that the Soviets simply could not be trusted.

Can you disagree with him?

He opposed the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 1972, he supported an anti-missile system designed to protect us weapons from Soviet attack. He opposed the nuclear freeze movement.

Dr. Teller believed that nuclear war was a real possibility, and there was practically no question that the Russians would win that war.

He said:

“We have conceived of our situation as a balance of terror. And the dreadful point is that the terror is obvious. The balance is not.”

In 1982 he said that his mission “is not an obsession. It's my duty. I'm doing it because few others are doing it.”

And so here's a man who worked as a Patriot. He was understood by the presidents of the country, mainly Ronald Reagan.

And he was cursed by the leftists in the scientific community and the media who are all basically socialists or communists.

This is an interview that should live for many, many decades. Thank you. Now let's listen.

A National Radio Hall of Fame recipient, Savage has hosted his radio show for more than 25 years and launched The Savage Nation Podcast in January of 2019 with one of the most successful podcast debuts. A prolific New York Times best-selling author, Dr. Savage's latest book is "Our Fight for America: The War Continues." To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.