Edward Teller

Edward Teller was a Hungarian-born American theoretical physicist widely known as the father of the hydrogen bomb for his central role in developing the first thermonuclear weapon. Teller worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during the Second World War on the design of the atomic bomb, but throughout the project he remained most interested in the theoretical possibility of a far more powerful weapon based on nuclear fusion rather than fission, an idea he continued to pursue after the war despite initial reluctance from many colleagues and from government policy. Following the Soviet Union's first successful atomic bomb test in 1949, Teller pushed hard for an American crash program to build a hydrogen bomb, and working with mathematician Stanislaw Ulam he helped develop the key design concept, known as the Teller-Ulam configuration, that made a practical thermonuclear weapon possible; the United States tested the first such device in 1952. Teller later became a controversial public figure in American science policy, testifying against his former Los Alamos colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer during Oppenheimer's 1954 security clearance hearing, and he remained an influential and often contentious advocate for nuclear weapons development and strategic defense programs for the rest of his long career, including helping found the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.