Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  Teller remained active—and controversial—into his nineties. Although bent with age and able to walk only with the aid of a five-foot-high walking staff that he carved himself from a tree limb, he behaved in interviews at his office at the conservative Hoover Institution of Stanford University like a ring-wise veteran boxer instinctively responding to the bell. Inevitably, he looked tired and worn in his rumpled suit, wash-and-wear shirt, and striped tie. Teller listened motionlessly to interviewers’ questions. Then the famously thick brows furrowed, the sad gray eyes zeroed in, and the apocalyptic words came out slowly—each of them intense, uncompromising, and opinionated. Many of the lines in the script were familiar, but their effect had only grown through recitation. He answered with thumps of his staff on the floor. He was by turns gentle and charming, dark and brooding, rude and combative, his moods punctuated by outbursts of wry humor and ill temper. To combat his own weariness and occasional boredom, he would sometimes doze. When something came to mind, however, he would come alive and start talking in great detail. (Once finished, he would start dozing again.) At home he played dreamy Mozart sonatas on his battered Steinway for hours at a stretch in search of emotional solace. He was a strangely restless man, still full of the ambition, the fear, and the sadness that had marked his long and busy life.

  “I don’t mind dying,” Rabi said in a widely watched 1983 public television interview. “My ancestors did that. What I do mind is the destruction of civilization. Take all my work—it is in libraries. Well, all that goes up in smoke. I mean the whole civilization. This is the holy thing which they are violating by pushing in the direction of an annihilating war.” 64

  Rabi’s use of the word “holy” hinted at something deeper. Religious themes increasingly colored his thinking in his final years, as he explained to a biographer near the end of his life:

  Nothing in the world can move me as deeply as some of these Orthodox Jewish practices. People go to Israel, to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, or to those places where Orthodox Jews go… and they pray and shake back and forth. Some people are appalled by it, but to me it is great. These are my people. I could join them, shake back and forth, and feel all right about it. The thing that saves me from any of those feelings is that I’m a scientist which I firmly believe transcends, doesn’t oppose, but transcends these particular things. I am of this and there is no question, but I’m not in it, couldn’t be in it. I love it and I respect it, but as a scientist I am at a more universal level… and this comes back to God. 65

  In 1983 Rabi attended a reunion at Los Alamos marking the fortieth anniversary of its founding. He returned to where it all began, back to the sun-drenched mesa and a sprawl of buildings more numerous and permanent than those that he had last seen during the war. So much had changed since then—not the least Rabi himself. “I’m seeing an abomination,” he said as his car approached Los Alamos. “We should have put it to rest years ago.” Later he addressed a large gathering of physicists at the lab. It was an emotionally charged moment, and the fervor of the occasion moved Rabi, whose eyesight was failing but whose conscience was not. “We meant well,” the white-haired, bespectacled Rabi declared as his mind went back to wartime Los Alamos. 66

  But the way things developed—and this is the folly—it became a thing in itself. The question now is not so much how to protect civilization, but how to destroy other human beings. We have lost sight of the basic tenets of all religions—that a human being is a wonderful thing. We talk as if humans were matter…. There is no way for scientists to escape the responsibilities of their knowledge…. We now have nations lined up like those prisoners at Auschwitz, going into the ovens and waiting for the ovens to be perfected, made more efficient. I submit that this fatalistic attitude is very un-American. It is not American to stand around waiting for something to happen, hoping it won’t, when you see it on the horizon. It would be much more true to our spirit to understand and prevent it. The United States was founded on a very revolutionary principle [:]… the greatness of the human spirit. Somehow, rather than this calculus of destruction, we must get back to our true nature as a nation and as part of western civilization…. How do we recover it? We cannot put this evil spirit back into the bottle. We have to learn to live with it. 67

  Rabi’s words were received at first with a sound of indrawn breaths, followed by a gigantic, collective sigh—then wave after wave of loud applause. Five years later, on January 11, 1988, I. I. Rabi died at his home in New York City after a long illness. He was eighty-nine.

  At a time when most people were happy to slow down, Teller continued to look ahead, championing weapons research and military preparedness after the collapse of the Soviet Union with the same intensity that he had during the height of the Cold War. The specter of bolshevism that had frightened him since his boyhood in Budapest disappeared into the dustbin of history, but the world remained a chaotic, hostile place in his mind and his adopted country remained perpetually at risk. At century’s end, when the United States reigned as the world’s sole superpower, Teller darkly warned that “America is as vulnerable as Poland was in 1939.” 68 The pain, insecurity, and paranoia of his refugee past never left him.

  Nor did the emotional sting of his ostracism in the wake of the Oppenheimer affair, despite his public damn-the-world attitude. The wound was extraordinarily deep and long lasting. More than thirty years on, Teller was asked how he had handled his loss. “As best I could,” he said in a voice that was so soft it could barely be heard. “Does it hurt?” he was asked. Teller exploded, “None of your business!” He then paused and added in a child’s high-low singsong, “Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn’t.” There was another long pause. “Of course that hurts! It was meant to hurt, and it did! I acquired a new set of friends at an age when most people make no more friends. In the meantime, I had lots of additional problems.” With that, he abruptly ended the line of questioning. 69 After he suffered a stroke in 1996, a nurse quizzed him to probe his lucidity. “Are you the famous Edward Teller?” she asked. “No,” he snapped, “I’m the infamous Edward Teller.” 70

  Toward the end of his long life, in 2001, Teller finally published his memoirs. They were like the man himself: by turns witty, insightful, defensive, and evasive. In them, Teller summarized his philosophy of nuclear-weapons work: “To my mind, in a democracy, using nuclear weapons is an issue entirely different from that of working on their development. Research on nuclear weapons has provided the United States with the ability to deter the use of nuclear weapons throughout the past half century.” 71 The ninety-three-year-old author showed occasional flashes of vulnerability and regret that he had never shown before. Perhaps most revealing was his comment that one of H. G. Wells’s lesser-known tales, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, gave him “particular pleasure.” 72 In Wells’s story, a skeptic discovers that he can work miracles. In the process of exploring his new talent, he commands the earth to stand still. That produces a catastrophe, because he forgets to command the atmosphere to stand still, too, and as a result everything is blown away. The man wishes he had never been given his power, and the story ends with the skeptic back in the setting where the tale began, where he undoes his recent past and loses forever the talent to perform miracles. Read as an autobiographical metaphor, Teller’s admiration for Wells’s tale was highly revealing. Two years later, on September 9, 2003, Edward Teller died at his home in Stanford, California. He was ninety-five.

  It had been a long life. Presidents had come and gone, but Teller had remained on center stage for decades, building bombs, advising leaders, fashioning himself into a force to be reckoned with. He had become the science hero of the Republican right and the patron saint of the military-industrial complex. He had built up an enormous inventory of incredibly deadly weapons that outlived the Soviet Union that he hated and feared, and he had personally hindered or blocked almost every effort to control the atomic arms race. Teller’s obsession with thermonuclear fusion may be recalled as a monumental contribution to
a world without major war. But if the world ever plunges into a nuclear Armageddon, its few survivors may regard Teller as the real incarnation of the fictional Dr. Strangelove. Eugene Wigner, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said of Teller: “He is the most imaginative person I ever met, and this means a great deal when you consider that I knew Einstein.” Rabi saw him quite differently: “He is a danger to all that is important,” he said. “I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller. I think he is an enemy of humanity.” 73

  Hans Bethe was the last survivor. When Bethe had witnessed the first atomic explosion at Trinity and then saw the photographs of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he had been shocked by what he saw—and had helped to create. “Everything starts with Los Alamos—with the atomic bomb,” said Bethe. “All the tragedies and all the mistakes that haunt us now begin there.” 74 His unease at the destructive power of the bomb had forced him to contemplate disquieting questions and to do what he had not done before: struggle deeply with the moral dilemmas and political implications of his work. After 1945 and for more than half a century, he wrote articles and pamphlets, signed petitions, held press conferences, lectured and debated throughout the world, and occasionally buttonholed important government officials—all in an effort to limit and control the terrible weapon that he and others had brought into the world. Beginning in the 1950s and for several decades thereafter, he chaired the CIA’s secret, highly influential panel charged with taking all source information about nuclear activities throughout the world and figuring out what was going on. Bethe worked within the system, wishing that by doing so he could help solve the problems presented by the bomb he and others had created.

  Bethe had always been and remained a strapping figure with a deceptively distracted look. His graying hair became thin and wispy and his loosely knotted tie perpetually missed his collar, but he was rigorously logical and he had a strong sense of his own abilities. His self-confidence and the force of his personality made it possible for him to act with a moral sensibility. In contrast to Oppenheimer, Bethe was the same whether he was dealing with a student, a colleague, the president of Cornell, or a senator in Washington. In a world of intellectual egotists and academic prima donnas, Bethe—who won the Nobel Prize in 1967—was a modest man who liked to say, “The great day is when the student knows more than the teacher.” Approachable, he always left his office door open. “When I arrived at Cornell and introduced myself to the great man,” said one of his postwar graduate students, “two things about him immediately impressed me. First, there was a lot of mud on his shoes. Second, the other students called him Hans.” 75

  Bethe’s activities in the postwar years brought him into repeated conflict with Teller. He opposed Teller on development of the superbomb in the 1950s, the Limited Test Ban Treaty in the 1960s, the atomic arms race in the 1970s, the nuclear freeze and SDI in the 1980s, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the 1990s. Unlike Teller, who believed scientists should build ever bigger bombs to make it disastrous for either side to start a war, Bethe doubted such bombs would lead to peace. “No technology race can make us secure,” he told a congressional committee in May 1985. “Only negotiation and agreements with the other side and a change in the atmosphere of international relations can do that.” Having helped lead the world into the dangerous age of nuclear weapons, Bethe wanted to help lead the world out of it. 76

  Bethe and Teller were two lions contesting the legacy of their momentous creation. Their lifelines had run a parallel course since long ago in prewar Europe, their fates intertwined and even mirror images of each other. Even their temperaments and abilities complemented each other, Teller with his spirited imagination, Bethe with his purposeful common sense. “I am tired of arguing with Hans,” Teller would grumble with a mixture of irritation and admiration. 77 Bethe showed similar feelings toward Teller. Throughout their letters to one another over the years ran a warm private relationship threaded with harsh differences on policy, frequent reassurances of personal and professional respect, and an occasional expression of hurtful surprise. Their friendship endured many strains, but each labored to preserve it.

  At the height of the SDI debate in the 1980s, Bethe wrote Teller a letter outlining his objections to the program. Teller usually reacted to such criticism with aggressive rebuttals, but he dwelled on more personal matters with Bethe:

  Dear Hans,

  It is good to have your objections in writing.

  I would have liked to respond in a prompt manner, but this was impossible for three reasons. The first is that your objections deserve a thorough answer.

  The second is that my schedule has been even more crowded than usual, and I could not acquire the necessary time. I confess that one unavoidable commitment was to celebrate my fiftieth wedding anniversary with Mici and all our children and grandchildren in Hawaii.

  The third and most important reason is that I have gotten into really serious trouble with my heart.

  Yesterday I had an exhaustive and exhausting catheterization of my heart. Tomorrow or Thursday, when I have recovered enough from that procedure, I will have a four or five bypass heart surgery. If and when I recover I will write to you independently.

  Edward 78

  Within months Teller had recovered enough to invite Bethe to visit him at Livermore. Bethe accepted, and made the visit in March 1985. He applauded the efforts of scientists while at Livermore, but repeated his doubts about SDI in articles and interviews thereafter. This prompted a pained response from Teller. “From a personal point of view, all this is very sad and I suspect that our feelings may be similar,” he wrote. “At the same time, I must pay more attention to my responsibilities as I see them rather than to my feelings. Indeed, the hope and effort for a useful defense in the strict and narrow sense of the word is the one remaining motivation for which I continue to work.” 79

  Bethe replied by forcefully summarizing their differing views on nuclear weapons:

  Dear Edward,

  I am happy that you wrote. Let me go right to fundamentals. We both want security for the United States and for the world, we both want to prevent a big nuclear war. But we differ fundamentally on how to achieve this goal. You think peace will be preserved by inventing ever new weapons, and by having a technology race. In my opinion, the arms race has made us less and less secure…. We are not going to convince each other, and we are both firmly committed to our convictions.

  Bethe then reached out across the decades of their differences and disagreements:

  I remember very fondly the years of our friendship, back in the 1930s and 1940s. I am very sad indeed that politics has separated us so far. But can’t we be personally friendly?

  Yours sincerely,

  Hans 80

  “Thank you for your kind letter,” Teller replied several weeks later, then testily asked: “Is peace better assured by negotiation with the Soviets or by working on defense?” “At this time, I do not urge work on weapons of mass destruction, but rather an effective defense against these weapons,” he summed up. “The conflict between the Soviets and us strikes me like the religious conflicts and wars lasting from 1517 to at least 1648,” Bethe replied, referring to the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing power struggles throughout western Europe. “But must we have the analogy of the Thirty Years War? With nuclear weapons, this would mean the end of civilization in the countries involved, and the ideological differences would become irrelevant.” 81

  That summer, Bethe and Teller both found themselves at Los Alamos. A party was held to which each was invited. Bethe arrived first and sat down at a table on the patio, where a group of people surrounded him. Then Teller arrived, stomping in in good humor. The hostess said, “Edward, there is someone here I want you to meet,” and she took him over to Bethe. They shook hands, sat down, and talked together to the exclusion of everyone else for the rest of the party. They were like two old high-school chums who hadn’t seen each other in forty years and had just foun
d one another. 82 Thereafter until ill health and old age slowed them both, Bethe, who visited Caltech each winter, would somehow find a way to see Teller, who was up the California coast at Stanford. 83

  By then, Bethe was in his eighties and the grand old man of American physics. His friendly blue eyes, soft white hair, and broad smile gave him the look of a favorite grandfather. He was deeply troubled by the irrationality and excesses of the nuclear arms race, but he remained what he had always been: thoughtful and meticulous. He still received visitors in his small office lined with bookcases on the third floor of the Newman Laboratory of Nuclear Studies at Cornell. He and his guests sat in straight-backed chairs around a simple metal desk covered with papers as Bethe listened attentively, barely shifting position. He spoke precisely in his deep, German-accented voice with a strength and orderliness that brooked no interruption but radiated honesty and curiosity. Asked if he sensed himself as a historical figure, he laughed. “Yes,” he said, and added: “As my son said after a talk, ‘Well, they got it from the horse’s mouth. And there aren’t so many horses left.’” 84 His work ethic remained strong, but he preferred to work now on the theory of binary stars—a peaceful theory, he liked to note, one that required experience and wisdom.

  As Bethe aged, his interests broadened beyond the natural world to the world of man. He took to reading history—lots of it. A visitor to his home was more likely to see Tacitus’s Germania than The Physical Review on the table by his reading chair. He increasingly put his faith not in technology but in human beings—a remarkable stance for a man who had dedicated his life to science. Only humane reasoning and political understanding, he felt, would prevent nuclear war. “If a man does not constantly ask himself what is the right thing to do,” he said, “I do not know what will become of him.” 85 Where before he was willing to play the insider in the hope of influencing policy, he now assumed the role of blunt sage and critic. On the fortieth anniversary of the Trinity test in July 1985, Bethe had journeyed to Washington and spoke to Congress like a latter-day Jeremiah: