HOW EDWARD TELLER LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB

[Susan Gawarecki <loc@ICX.NET>]

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HOW EDWARD TELLER LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB

from The New York Times



They have almost all departed, the remarkable men and women who

discovered

how to release nuclear energy and then applied that knowledge to build

the

formidable weapons that until Sept. 11 had kept us safe. Hans Bethe at

Cornell and Edward Teller at California's Hoover Institution endure like

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and such is their intellectual vitality

that they continue even in their 90's to contribute to our continuing

effort to understand the consequences of their work.



Edward Teller has published other memoirs, but none has been so

comprehensive as this presumably final statement; appropriately,

borrowing

the phrase from his old friend and fellow Hungarian Leo Szilard, he

calls it ''my version of the facts.'' Sadly, if it sometimes enlarges

and clarifies the historical record, it more frequently denies or

distorts it.



Teller, born in 1908, remembers that he was an anxious child, with ''an

almost chronic bad conscience'' and a ''fear of the dark.'' He

distracted

himself from his fears with compulsive calculation; ''finding the

consistency of numbers is the first memory I have of feeling secure.''

It

was security he would need in the difficult years of his childhood, when

Hungary saw war, economic collapse, a Communist takeover and then, under

Miklos Horthy, the first fascist regime in Europe.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/books/review/25RHODEST.html>

-- 

.....................................................

Susan L. Gawarecki, Ph.D., Executive Director

Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee

Please visit our Web site - http://www.local-oversight.org

.....................................................

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