Edward Teller: the father of the H-bomb

[rangerrebew]

Edward Teller: the father of the H-bomb
Edward Teller’s love of mathematical and quantum abstractions helped make armageddon a practical possibility.
Jeffrey Phillips

The words on the telegram sent by Edward Teller in December 1952 appeared to herald life-affirming news:

“It’s a boy.”

The message, however, was in code. To those in the know, the message wasn’t about new life at all but the possibility of human extinction. It meant the world’s first test of a hydrogen bomb – a thermonuclear 'fusion' weapon 500 times more powerful than the atomic 'fission' bombs dropped on Japan – had not only worked but exceeded expectations, transforming the Pacific island of Elugelab into one giant crater.

This event was primarily responsible for Teller – a Hungarian émigré, physics professor, member of the Manhattan Project and at that point co-founder of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California – being forever dubbed “the father of the hydrogen bomb”.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/mathematics/edward-teller-the-father-of-the-h-bomb

[Joe Wooten]

He also made sure that US power reactors were negative void coefficient types, not positive void coefficient types like Chernobyl. When the AEC was considering research into power reactors in the early 1950's, those type of reactors were being considered for use here, since there already were smaller types operating producing plutonium at Hanford. By the dint of his forceful personality, he convinced the AEC to abandon this line of research and concentrate on water moderated and gas moderated and molten salt reactors.

[Suppressed]

When Scientific American turned his obituary into an awful political screed, that's when I dropped my subscription.

[Joe Wooten]

When Scientific American turned his obituary into an awful political screed, that's when I dropped my subscription.

Scientific American lost me back in the 1996 when they got overtly political about the global warming hoax. Like National Geographic, they had been getting more overtly left wing for years and by 1996 I had enough on both of them and dropped my subscriptions.