MEMOIRS: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics.

• Author: Cockburn, Andrew
• Position: Review

MEMOIRS: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics by Edward Teller Perseus Book, $35.00

IN THE DECADES AFTER Hiroshima, most of the physicists who had conceived and built the first fission weapons and their thermonuclear successors had the grace to admit that there might be some drawbacks to their achievement. Many of these physicists lent their weight to lobbying for arms control, while the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the house organ for such types, used as its banner the clever device of a clock set close to midnight to warn how close we were to extinction.

Edward Teller was always the exception among the original elite Los Alamos team. He really liked nuclear weapons, said so repeatedly, and resented prevailing prejudices against their further development and use. In an understandable paradox, he promoted the cause of his beloved monsters by arguing that they weren't really all that dangerous, deriding descriptions of their apocalyptic consequences as "dangerous myth" and citing the "fact" that streetcars were running in Hiroshima within three days of the first bomb--an utter canard (it actually took three months for mass transit to begin moving amid the nuclear ruins).

True to his beliefs, Teller argued forcefully for nonmilitary use of nuclear explosives in digging canals or gouging out harbors while energetically lobbying for ballistic missile defense (using nuclear weapons, of course) decades before he found a ready audience in Ronald Reagan. Some of his non-nuclear activities were hardly more appealing, most infamously his betrayal, through damning testimony, of his colleague and friend Robert Oppenheimer when the witch-hunters went after him in 1954--an act for which many old friends and colleagues never forgave him.

Now, at the age of 93, Teller has produced his memoirs. Not surprisingly, they present a kinder, gentler Teller, an engaging self-portrait of a brilliant gadfly who spent much of his life in the company of other genii, many of whom he had known since childhood. It is astonishing how the world was changed by a small group of Hungarians. During his last two years at school, for example, Teller met three young men who were, like him, from the Jewish community in Budapest: Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Leo Szilard. They would talk after school about physics. Szilard later conceived the notion of an atomic chain reaction and went on to convince Roosevelt to start the American bomb project, while von...