The nuclear arms race had taken a fearful step forward. Develops Hydrogen Bomb. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! The Knickerbockers are led by guard Leo Gottlieb, who scored 14 points in the game played before 7, fans at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.
Although they lost to the On November 1, , the day after Halloween, Jacques Plante of the Montreal Canadiens revolutionizes hockey by donning a facemask, the first NHL goaltender to do so in a regular-season game. Plante wears the custom-made fiberglas mask after suffering a badly cut nose and lip on The treaty was drafted in by delegates from the European Community meeting at Maastricht in the Netherlands and signed in Friends said Teller resented Oppenheimer's charismatic hold on their colleagues, especially since Teller was convinced -- and many agreed with him -- that he was the better physicist.
Relations got cooler when Oppenheimer named Hans Bethe as director of the theoretical division, a position Teller coveted. Bethe and Teller clashed repeatedly, and Oppenheimer had to play referee. More important, all but Teller had agreed that the project would narrow its scope toward the construction of a fission bomb.
Teller decided that they should go well beyond that toward a thermonuclear device, a fusion bomb. His constant attempts to get support for the "Super," as he called it, were seen by many, including Oppenheimer, as a distraction. He became even more of a distraction when he produced equations that showed the possibility that a fission weapon could ignite the world's atmosphere. It was later discovered his calculations were wrong -- and a dozen other men made similar mistakes later -- but work stopped until the flaw was found.
I looked the beast in the eye, and I was impressed. So were the others at Los Alamos. With the war in Europe obviously over the Germans never came close to producing a bomb , the only enemy left was the Japanese. Many of the scientists behind the bomb project were Jewish refugees from Hitler, and while they saw Japan as the enemy of their adopted country, they did not have the same moral outrage against Japan as they did against Nazi Germany. Some also worried about the morality of dropping the atomic bomb on a civilian target without warning.
Szilard proposed a petition at Los Alamos opposing the looming attack. For years Teller maintained that he opposed use of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that he only refused to sign the petition at Oppenheimer's behest. In a July 2, letter to Szilard, Teller wrote: "If you should succeed in convincing me that your moral objections are valid, I should quit working.
I hardly think that I would start protesting. After the war was over, Teller went to work with Enrico Fermi in Chicago, convinced the atomic bomb alone would not guarantee peace.
He continued to push for development of the Super. But a committee of scientists, led by Oppenheimer, declared the Super both unnecessary and immoral. To Teller, this was dangerous advice. With the Cold War pulsing about them, Truman, at Teller's urging, overruled the scientific committee and went ahead with development of the fusion bomb.
Teller contributed still-secret work on the design. But even here, his contributions, perhaps discolored by the subsequent controversy, are not clear. He is generally credited with much of the design work. Bethe maintained that Teller's miscalculations at Los Alamos actually delayed development of the Super. But he was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous program on the basis of calculations which he himself must have known to have been very incomplete.
Teller "needs men with more judgment, even if they are less gifted, to select the 10th idea, which is often a stroke of genius. The first thermonuclear device was exploded in November, By this time, Oppenheimer was director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and still was exerting great influence over the scientific establishment.
In December , Oppenheimer's security clearance was suspended by a special panel formed by the Atomic Energy Commission to decide if he was a security risk. The formal charges were based partly on Teller's secret interview in with the FBI. Oppenheimer had a seriously problematic security file.
His wife, brother, sister-in-law and a former lover were Communists, and he supported and belonged to a number of Communist front organizations in Berkeley in the s. But most of the scientists called to testify supported Oppenheimer, disputing the validity of the charge he was then a security risk. Teller was one of the few exceptions. At the end of his generally complimentary testimony, Teller was asked if he considered Oppenheimer a security risk.
He responded with 24 words that triggered one of the most bitter feuds in the history of American science: "I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. The first US airdrop of a thermonuclear bomb happened on May 20th, Cold War.
Popular articles. He could have declined and still saved his reputation but he chose not to. Curiously, the actual testimony offered by Teller is at the same time rather straightforward as well as vague enough to be interpreted damningly. It has an air of calculated ambiguity about it that makes it particularly potent.
What Teller said was the following:. In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act - I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted - in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. What is interesting about the testimony, as explained by Freeman Dyson in his autobiography, is that it's actually quite undramatic and true.
Oppenheimer had lied to army officials during the war regarding an indirect approach made to him for ferrying secrets to the Soviet Union. He had refused right away but had then concocted an unnecessary and bizarre "cock and bull story" in his own words to explain his actions.
That story had not gotten him into trouble during the war because of his indispensable role in the project, but it certainly qualified him as "confused and complicated".
In addition after the war, Oppenheimer's views on nuclear weapons also often appeared conflicted, as did his loyalties to his former students.
Oppenheimer's opinions on the hydrogen bomb which were quite sound were however also interpreted as "confused and complicated" by Teller. But where Teller was coming from, Oppenheimer's actions were hard to understand, and therefore it was clear that Teller would trust opinions regarding national security in someone's else's hands.
Thus Teller's testimony was actually rather unsurprising and sensible when seen in a certain context. As it happened however, his words were seen as a great betrayal by the majority of physicists who supported Oppenheimer. The result of this perception was that Teller himself was damaged far more by his testimony than was Oppenheimer. Close friends simply stopped talking to him and one former colleague publicly refused to shake his hand, a defiant display that led Teller to retire to his room and weep.
He was essentially declared a pariah by a large part of the wartime physics community. It is likely that Teller would have reconsidered testifying against Oppenheimer had he known the personal price he would have to pay.
But the key point here is that Teller had again let personal feelings interfere with objective decision making; Teller's animosity toward Oppenheimer went back years, and he knew that as long as the emperor ruled he could never take his place.
This was his chance to stage a coup. As it happened his decision simply led to a great tragedy of his life, a tragedy that was particularly acute since his not testifying would have essentially made no difference in the revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance. This inability to keep the personal separate from reality exemplified Teller's obsession with nuclear weapons for the next fifty years until his death.
At one point he was paranoid enough to proclaim that he saw himself in a Soviet prison camp within five years. I will not go so far as to label Teller paranoid from a medical standpoint but some of the symptoms certainly seem to be there.
Teller's attachment to his hydrogen bombs became so absolute that he essentially opposed almost every effort to seek reconciliation and arms reductions with the Soviets. He also publicly debated Linus Pauling regarding the genetic effects of radiation just as he would debate Carl Sagan twenty years later regarding nuclear winter. Sagan has a particularly illuminating take on Teller's relationship with nuclear weapons in his book "The Demon- Haunted World".
The book has an entire chapter on Teller in which Sagan tries to understand Teller's love affair with bombs. Sagan's opinion is that Teller was actually sincere in his beliefs that nuclear weapons were humanity's savior.
He actually believed that these weapons would solve all our problems in war and peace.
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