EDITOR'S NOTE: Today, 95-year-old physicist Edward Teller will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, described by the White House as "the nation's highest civil honor." Selecting Teller as one of this year's ten medal winners takes courage — the man is reviled on the Left as the father of the H-bomb, an early supporter of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, and a stalwart anti-Communist. Yet he is fully deserving of the award as one of the 20th century's most important scientists and for his important role in winning the Cold War. Unfortunately, Teller's health will keep him from picking up his medal in person. "He is still wonderfully able mentally," says Judith Shoolery, a longtime assistant who helped the great man write his autobiography, Memoirs. Last year, John J. Miller profiled Teller in National Review, in the September 30, 2002, issue. he famous eyebrows are as bushy as they've ever been, though they've lost their color. The hair has turned white, too, and it's thinning. The eyes no longer see, except to tell the difference between day and night. Yet Edward Teller, perhaps the most politically important scientist of the 20th century, still possesses a sharp and curious mind. He dictates responses to e-mails, travels to his office twice a week, and stays on top of current events. Late last year, he published Memoirs, a 628-page brick of a book that is at once lively and profound; the paperback comes out this October. It chronicles a remarkable life, and includes everything from a description of meeting the legendary physicist Niels Bohr to advice on how we might one day stop gigantic meteors from smashing into the earth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/24/science/24TELL.html?searchpv=nytToday Excerpts from a NY Times article about who designed the H-bomb.
--begin excerpt--
...Edward Teller took a breath, sat down with a friend and a tape
recorder and offered his views on the secret history of the hydrogen
bomb.
"So that first design," Dr. Teller said, "was made by Dick Garwin."
He repeated the credit, ensuring there would be no misunderstanding.
Dr. Teller, now 93, was not ceding the laurels for devising the bomb
- a glory he claims for himself. But he was rewriting how the rough
idea became the world's most feared weapon. His tribute, made more
than two decades ago but just now coming to light, adds a surprising
twist to a dispute that has roiled historians and scientists for
decades: who should get credit for designing the H-bomb?
...
The New York Times obtained a transcript of the recording recently
from the friend with whom Dr. Teller shared his memories. Some
historians of science praise Dr. Teller's tribute to Dr. Garwin as
candid; others fault it as disingenuous.
....
In an interview, Dr. Garwin said Dr. Teller was correct to include
him among the bomb's designers, likening himself to its midwife. "It
was the kind of thing I do well," he said of joining theory,
experiment and engineering to make complex new devices.
....
If Dr. Teller's version of events is right, he and Dr. Garwin were
the main forces behind one of the most ominous inventions of all
time, a bomb that harnessed the fusion power of the sun.
Dr. Teller had championed the goal since the early 1940's, long
before the atomic bomb flashed to life. His basic idea was to use the
high heat of an exploding atomic bomb to ignite hydrogen fuel, fusing
its atoms together and releasing even larger bursts of nuclear
energy. But no one working at Los Alamos could figure out how to do
that.
....
Dr. Garwin arrived at Los Alamos in May 1951 from the University of
Chicago, where he had been a star in the laboratory of Enrico Fermi,
the Nobel laureate and arguably the day's top physicist. Dr. Garwin
had been at Los Alamos the previous summer and, intrigued by the
work, had come back for another atomic sabbatical.
In the interview, Dr. Garwin recalled that Dr. Teller had told him of
the new idea and asked him to design an experiment to prove that it
would work - something the Los Alamos regulars failed to do. "They
were burnt out" from too many rush efforts to build and test
prototype nuclear arms, Dr. Garwin recalled. "So I did it."