Teller's War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception.

• Author: Fallows, James

This is a very good book (*) with a small skeleton in its closet. Let's do justice to its merits first. William Broad, a well-known science correspondent for the The New York Times, has covered the political, technical, and military implications of the Star Wars program almost since the day Ronald Reagan proposed it in 1983. The evangelical steam has now gone out of Star Wars, with the departure first of Reagan from the White House and then of the Soviet Union from the family of nations. But the Star Wars budget rolls on--some $4 billion will go into the program this year. That Star Wars ever came this far, Broad argues, is largely due to the efforts of one man--or maybe two, if you count Reagan himself. Teller's War presents a techno-political history of Star War through the intertwined narratives of one man and one invention.

The man is of course Edward Teller, the crazy-genius Hungarian refugee who in the late forties played a crucial role in developing the American hydrogen bomb. In the early eighties, Teller again made a crucial difference, Broad says, by legitimizing Reagan's strategic defense proposals both inside and outside the government.

On the inside, Teller was able to tell Reagan that the project the president had long dreamed of--building a perfect shield against incoming warheads, which would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete"--was not just a dream but could in fact be attained. Reagan's yearning for a perfect shield was obviously not the result of his own careful, Jimmy Carter-like study of ballistic technology. It reflected what was simultaneously the best and worst about Reagan: his tendency to latch onto big, appealing ideas without getting bogged down in the details. Like many nuclear - freeze and ban - the - bomb protesters, Reagan seemed to view the doctrine of nuclear deterrence as basically immoral: Some day it was bound to break down, and at that point everyone would die. A few years before he became president, Reagan gave a speech in which he proclaimed, "For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ." A nuclear shield would provide a way out of this depressing dilemma (at least from America's perspective, although it would presumably leave the Soviet Union utterly exposed to nuclear attack), but only if it could actually be built.

It made a huge difference, therefore, to have one of the world's most famous physicists on hand to say, "Yes, Mr. President. No problem. It can be done." In fulfilling this role, Teller became the defense counterpart of the supply-side economic advisers who were telling Reagan at just the same time, "Yes, Mr. President. No problem. You can cut taxes and not cut spending, and the deficit will take care of itself." (These two camps of yes-men will have a lot to answer for in the history books.)

Outside government, in the prolonged PR battle over the feasibility of Star Wars, Teller's role was also crucial. Politicians and scientists knew that he was not politically neutral. Thirty years earlier, Teller had been the most prominent scientist to side against J. Robert Oppenheimer when Oppenheimer was accused of disloyalty. In the pre-Reagan years, Teller had given long, doom-laden speeches about the inevitable Soviet triumph--unless the West was rescued by "several miracles." In 1981, he began to say that one of the necessary miracles had occurred: the election of Ronald Reagan.

Broad says that if Teller's background had been more fully known, the press and politicians might have been even more skeptical of his biases, because at several points in the preceding decades he had exaggerated the performance and scientific merit of weapons he wanted Congress to approve. But it probably would not have made a difference. No matter how suspicious Teller's opponents might have been of his motives, it was simply impossible to debate with him on equal terms. He stood before any audience as a celebrated if controversial genius. Many critics of Star Wars, in Congress and in the press, weren't really sure of the difference between a quantum level and a quark. If Teller said that new discoveries really would make Star Wars feasible, people were bound to give his views weight.

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