Posted on 09/12/2003 3:58:57 AM PDT by billorites
AMERICAN HEROES aren’t always the ones who have the bulging muscles or steely nerves required to operate the increasingly complex and powerful weaponry that helps deter our enemies. They also are the ones who conceive and make possible those at once marvelous and horrible devices. One such hero was Dr. Edward Teller, who died Tuesday at the age of 95.
Teller was a native Hungarian who fled fascist Hungary and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In the 1940s he joined the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.
With Teller at Los Alamos was a Communist sympathizer named Ted Hall. Through a series of Communist Party contacts, Hall passed the basic A-bomb design to the Soviet Union. After the Soviets developed their own atomic bomb in 1949, Teller was instrumental in convincing the United States government to upgrade to the more devastating hydrogen bomb.
Over the next half century, Teller helped ensure that America remained the most powerful military force on earth. Teller did not do this work alone, but had he not existed, it is quite possible that President Truman may not have been convinced of the necessity of the H-bomb, President Reagan may not have pushed missile defense, and the arms race that bankrupted the Soviet Union may not have happened.
Teller, almost alone among the nation’s top physicists, saw socialism in all of its forms as the evil it truly was. For all that he contributed to our victory in the cold war, America and the world are deeply in his debt.
. . . and provided the scientific credential that backed up the program.Gorbychev attributes the fall of the USSR to the fallout of Reagan's refusal to negotiate on missile defense at the Iceland summit.
So I guess you'd have to say that Reagan and Teller were the ones who did the USSR in. The Navy should name a ship after him.
I think we'll see the USS Ashcroft commissioned first.
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