Dare Obasanjo: Difference between revisions

This was a moment of tragedy for both Bethe and Teller. They had been close friends for many years, since long before the war. Their temperaments and abilities complemented each other wonderfully, Teller with his high spirits and free-ranging imagination, Bethe with his seriousness and powerful common sense. Before Bethe married, he was so often a guest in the Teller home that he became almost one of the family. In April 1954 that was all over. There could be no real reconciliation. Bethe had lost one of his oldest friends. But Teller had lost more: Teller, by lending his voice to the cause of Oppenheimer's enemies, had lost not only the friendship but the respect of many of his colleagues. He was portrayed by newspaper writers and cartoonists as a Judas, a man who had betrayed his leader for the sake of personal gain. A careful reading of his testimony at the trial shows that he intended no personal betrayal. He wanted only to destroy Oppenheimer's political power, not to damage Oppenheimer personally. But the mood of that time made such fine distinctions meaningless. In the eyes of the majority of scientists and academic people, Oppenheimer's trial was simply a campaign led by a group of paranoid patriots who were trying to silence opposition to their policies by a personal attack on their most visible opponent. By joining the campaign, no matter what he said and no matter why he said it, Teller made himself an object of hatred and distrust to a whole generation of young people. He wounded himself more grievously than he wounded Oppenheimer. Like Oppenheimer before him, Teller, too, had been seduced by the Demon at the summit of F6. The abbot in the monastery had foretold their fate in his warning to M.F.:

Nuclear explosives have a glitter more seductive than gold to those who play with them. To command nature to release in a pint pot the energy that fuels the stars, to lift by pure thought a million tons of rock into the sky, these are exercises of the human will that produce an illusion of illimitable power. Oppenheimer and Teller each came to perform these exercises of the human will for good and honest reasons. Oppenheimer was driven to build this power by the fear that Hitler might otherwise seize it first. Teller was driven to build hydrogen bombs by the fear that Stalin would use this power to rule the world. Oppenheimer, being Jewish, had good reason to fear Hitler. Teller, being Hungarian, had good reason to fear Stalin. But each of them, having achieved his technical objective, wanted more. Each of them was led by his Demon to seek political as well as technical power. Each of them became convinced that he must have political power to ensure that the direction of the enterprise he had created should not fall into hands that he considered irresponsible. In the end, each of them was irrevocably committed to exercises of the human will in the political as well as the technical sphere. And so each of them in his own way came to grief.