Birds on the Brain: Whether it's ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Arkansas or chilled Penguins in Antarctica, modern man can't take his eyes off birds
Mehan, G. Tracy III
"Birds on the Brain" S CHARLES DE GAULLE WAS LIBERATING FRANCE from Nazi Germany's puppet Vichy regime in 1944, he was asked about its head, Marshal Henri Petain—the same Petain who had been arguably France's greatest...
...But it misses something essential...
...To the end, Teller remained a big draw...
...He worked against limitations on nuclear testing, and he won contracts for Livermore labs to build new generations of nukes...
...Worse, Goodchild tells us that Teller's two projects, the X-ray laser Excalibur and the Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptors, were the technical essence of the movement for missile defense in the 1980s...
...His resentment of the man instrumental in that sidelining, Robert Oppenheimer, built upon political differences...
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...1999 Free Bulbs for Life' THE TELLER TRAGEDY Los Alamos's director Robert Oppenheimer not to appoint Teller as head of the division of theoretical physics because, according to Rabi, Teller was insufficiently systematic...
...They surmised that if what they heard from him did not make a whole lot of sense, it must be their fault...
...In fact, no optical system can handle them...
...But the revival of interest in missile defense that began in the late 1970s had nothing to do with him, or with any technology with which he was familiar...
...Yet by early spring the seeds of discord had been sown...
...Increasingly, the split was between left and right...
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...Indeed, the two merged in his own mind...
...By the time the money began to flow to produce the pile of uranium and graphite that would prove the concept of the high-energy chain reaction, the Nazis were overrunning Europe...
...pointer-tracker, that each arm of the X-ray laser would have had to have an independent one, and that building thousands of pointer-trackers to function and be destroyed instantaneously was doubly nuts...
...After that put-off, the scientists enlisted Albert Einstein, whose letter to Franklin Roosevelt Teller delivered to an intermediary...
...His intellectual history of U.S...
...In short, factor out Teller and SDI still happens...
...In 1943 he very foolishly initiated conversations with Los Alamos security, using a bogus story to distract them from his contact with his Communist mistress and with his brother...
...His superior political skills, added to the glamorous success of the H-bomb tests, got him on the cover of Teller continued to press gently for the hydrogen bomb, and arguing for its feasibility while more and more of his colleagues and friends, including Fermi, were pressing for a cessation of nuclear testing...
...In 1932 Enrico errni let the 23 year old work in his laboratory in Rome...
...But a simple media search would have shown that missile defense was already part of an atmosphere built up by lesser beings...
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...Teller's ostracism was professional almost as much as political...
...Teller had found a strong supporter in Ernest Lawrence, of UC Berkeley, who was lobbying for a laboratory, at Livermore, that would compete with Los Alamos...
...Besides, he was more of a theoretician than a practitioner...
...His world thenceforth became that of government contracting and defense policy...
...Fermi rescued Teller from a riptide off California's Half Moon Bay...
...In fact, no data existed...
...The revelation in 1950 that the Soviet Union had thoroughly penetrated the atom bomb project at Los Alamos through leftist elements forced leftists to defend their loyalty, and armed rightists with the presumption of superior dedication to national security...
...foreign relations will be published by Yale University Press...
...Perhaps the distinction between fact and fancy had ceased to matter...
...He was not solely responsible for the fact that SDI spent some $34 billion without producing any usable device...
...Angelo M. Codevilla, professor of international relations at Boston University, fellow of the Claremont Institute, and senior editor of The American Spectator, was a Foreign Service officer and a staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee...
...Typically, he would say something about techhim...
...Political differences among the scientists resurfaced as Germany's defeat loomed...
...BUT WHAT WAS TELLER'S ROLE IN SDI...
...Oppenheimer was no longer in charge...
...His own associates screamed...
...By December 1942, when the message "The Italian navigator has landed, the natives are friendly" told Roosevelt that Fermi's Chicago pile had proved the fission weapon's possibility, fusion had captivated Teller...
...citizen, and had family behind enemy lines...
...That point comes when the beam becomes narrower than about two degrees...
...If atoms of uranium or plutonium were to be squeezed together as powerfully as the iron in the Earth's core, the increased density would increase exponentially the likelihood that neutrons produced by one fission would set off other fissions...
...Still, when Teller (or mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, depending on whose version one believes) figured out that radiation (rather than shock waves) from fission explosions could be used to compress the hydrogen isotopes that fuel fusion, the hydrogen bomb became inevitable...
...The hearing's Teller was ostracized in academia...
...Though as the Senate staffer principally concerned with these matters, I had the same clearances as he, Teller refused to give specific data on laboratory work in these fields...
...Then China and the Soviets invaded Korea...
...negotiated away in the ABM treaty of 1972...
...It took him until 1953 to draw up an indictment, which led to a hearing on Opon to deploy his massive reputation in the service of conservative, strong defense policies in general, and of contracts for Livermore, especially for his pet people at Livermore, in particular...
...Indeed as Teller, now backed by the Senate and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), pressed for the H-bomb, Los Alamos hardly was eager...
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...Initial calculations suggested a sphere of at least 20 cm diameter...
...passionately and worked very hard to defend her, but whose confusion of his own personal success with America's good came to define him, aggravated the disagreements among American scientists into hatreds that crippled American weaponeering, then led to his own descent from the highest levels of 24 OCTOBER 2005 science into hucksterism, and finally made him perhaps more responsible than any other person for the fact that America still lacks defenses against the weapons he did so much to invent...
...OCTOBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 31...
...This insight made possible the detailed design of bombs small enough to be used operationally...
...Columbia's Isidor Rabi convinced continued on page 28 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2005 Now get FREE new and improved Bulbs for Lifet A floor lamp that spreads sunshine all over a room, and pays for itself...
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...By 1947 an FBI report on Oppenheimer had been delivered to the Atomic Energy Commission...
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...Teller was by no means useless...
...Teller gravitated to the West Coast...
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...A thousandnology...
...One almost hears Verdi's Otello turning his back on "holy memories...
...But those who were, were his people, and even less accommodating than he...
...The star witness, Teller himself, said that he mistrusted Oppenheimer's judgment, not his loyalty...
...Such was the life of Edward Terer:Wrery brilliant man who loved America...
...He looked at me as if he believed every word...
...The Warand the Bomb TELLER WAS BY NO MEANS the least contributor to the fruitful atmosphere of scientific and personal comity that joined the emigre physicists in late '30s America...
...Teller's intellectual style is familiar to all who struggle through math problems only to find that the other fellow has skipped to the BY ANGELO M. CODEVILLA right answer, and is working backward...
...Reagan's own Science Adviser, George A. Keyworth, had been quoted in the Washington Post that he had spent the greatest part of his time since coming to Washington trying to turn off congressional pressure for missile defense...
...When Niels Bohr concluded that his bombardment of uranium with protons produced not just heavy radioactive "trans -uranic" elements but lighter (nonradioactive) elements as well—and radiated protons, Teller and Fermi pounced: could not these radiated protons themselves split uranium atoms...
...Nor did any witness opine that Oppie was disloyal...
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...Gone forever was the accommodating physicist...
...To that Edward Teller, President Bush awarded the Medal of Freedom on August 26, 2003, from a nation that was lucky to have had him...
...In 1935 Teller joined the exodus of German, Italian, Hungarian, and Danish scientists to America...
...In short, Teller used his prestige to shut off the practical projects that had aroused the nation's interest in modern missile defense, in the exclusive pursuit of ideas whose only merit was their association withtimes better than the minimum...
...But they figured out how to deliver that, as well as nukes that could be fired from medium artillery...
...This insight allowed the building of the Spartan-Sprint missile defense system that the U.S...
...That is because—an understandable fault in a biography—he treats the subject as if it penheimer's clearance in 1954...
...More than once, as the Fellows were leaving the dinner, some historian or other would come up to me and say something like: "That was all BS, right...
...The split in the scientific community was widening...
...Hence "long" (meaning relatively weak) X-rays are useful only insofar as they are generated in beams so tight that they will transmit more energy per unit area, farther, than will the short, powerful X-rays released by the explosion itself...
...Provehimself he did, from his earliest days, with a kind of scientific prowess heavy on intuition...
...Still, he and his project had been sidelined...
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...He looked at me as if he believed every word...
...The possibility of fission chain reactions, and all that implied, was thereby discovered...
...Missile Defense OUR CONTEMPORARIES will be interested in Edward Teller chiefly because of his involvement with missile defense in the 1980s...
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...The clashes over developing the hydrogen "super," as well as that between Teller and Oppenheimer, were prototypical and instrumental in this extension of the Cold War into American academic life...
...The reader will need a bit of background...
...A staff member, William Borden, became convinced that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy...
...Gratitude and wonder produced love at first sight, further fired by the affection that the bride of his life, Mici, felt for this country...
...It did not take detailed knowledge to notice...
...The decade after 1945 however saw a realignment and homogenization of political, personal, and professional activities...
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...Among them was Robert Oppenheimer...
...And as the meeting of the Joint Chiefs that would present Ronald Reagan with the option of embracing strategic defense was being prepared, the front page of the Washington Post's Outlook section consisted of a debate between Hans Bethe and Senator Malcolm Wallop—not Teller—on laser anti-missile weapons...
...The radically increased accuracy of interceptors, the sensitivity of radars and of optical sensors in orbit, as well as the power of computers to make sense of them, well nigh erased the distinction between airOCTOBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29 THE TELLER TRAGEDY craft defense and missile defense, and made both more feasible than ever...
...obvious driving force, however, was that Oppenheimer and his friends had stood in the way of the H-bomb...
...But whereas A- and H-bombs can be understood reasonably well as an extension of Fermi, Teller, Oppenheimer, et al., missile defense cannot...
...Only...
...When Graham refused to abandon the interceptors, Teller told the world that the entire concept was silly...
...Hence they teach us that our virtues do not insure us against wrecking ourselves and what we love The most instructive and gripping tragedies, we think of Aesch...
...The lesson Teller learned, however, was: "It's impossible to lie about the future...
...Now Teller perceived not only manipulation and bad faith but an adverse political agenda...
...He obtained money not by "lying about the future," but by actually lying about the present...
...What mass of super scarce uranium-235 or plutonium would it take to sustain a chain reaction...
...Unfortunately, since Edison invented the light bulb, lighting technology has remained relatively prehistoric...
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...In the process, Livermore learned to use fissionable materials for containment vessels and other parts...
...But his responsibility is big...
...I had several chances to question Edward Teller on these points, and received outright lies for answers...
...Donors felt privileged to have seen and heard the "father of the H-bomb...
...And the effects of indoor lighting are not necessarily limited to physical well-being...
...This "super" bomb became central to Teller in no small part because, as the fission bomb project took off in early 1942, he was excluded from a central role in it...
...Shakespeare's, are set amidst great events...
...Yet they had been mutually admiring friends...
...We need not agree with Goodchild's stress on Edward Teller's insecure youth in the last days of Austro-Hungarian Budapest to note that Teller always acted as if he had something to prove...
...Studies show that sunshine can lift your mood and your energy levels...
...But Teller remembered that the Earth's iron core exists in a molten, super-compressed state...
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...Teller, according to Goodchild, became "a man with a mission...
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...Goodchild mentions correctly that by 1982-83 the Reagan administration's strategic policy was bankrupt, and that its principals were casting about for alternatives...
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...We see the everiffkeoritribniiiig to the flaw's development, the good and great man's decline, and marvel at what might have happened if only a few people had behaved better...
...Fermi had suggested to Teller that a fission explosion might generate enough dense energy to duplicate the conditions in the core of stars that set off the fusion of hydrogen into helium, with colossal releases of energy...
...Teller was conservative in every way...
...A former student of his OCTOBER 2005 25 THE TELLER TRAGEDY wrote: "Fermi who taught me also, builds a house from the foundations up...
...Peter Good-child's gratuitous subtitle, "The Real Dr...
...A Pyrrhic victory...
...Indeed, he solved fission's most practical problem...
...In this climate he would get his hydrogen bomb, and blast anyone who stood in his way...
...Such was the case with the warhead for the Navy Polaris missile: a megaton weighing 600 pounds...
...He does not mention that by far the most complex and expensive part of any directed energy weapon is the Teller's answer regarding pointing and tracking was even more outrageous: there was cheap micro-technology that made all previous approaches obsolete...
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...Nuclear physics was irrelevant...
...Many people believe that the quantity and quality of light can play a part in one's mood and work performance...
...Thus did a great scientist slip the leash of truth...
...Goodchild also tells us that, before the X-ray laser was discredited, Teller appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to discredit any and all other approaches to anti-missile 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2005 ANGELO M. CODEVILLA defense, especially the one that the Senate had already backed twice, the chemical space laser...
...Less and less did he care about the accuracy of what he might say, so long as he got his way...
...Emboldened, he now won contracts by promising results that not even he could see how to realize...
...Two weeks later, as de Gaulle might have said, his death ended...
...Despite the fact that he admitted to having lied to his security officer, no one adduced any breach of security, never mind disloyalty...
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...The official purpose was to determine whether Oppenheimer was worthy of a security clearance...
...The emigre scientists were even more eager than the Americans to make the Bomb before the Germans did...
...Oppenheimer took the views of a subordinate, and appointed Bethe over Teller...
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...ANGELO M. CODEVILLA Time as "the father of the H-bomb" and he took credit for much of the work that had been done at Los Alamos...
...The leftists had been interested primarily in defeating Germany...
...Colleagues were livid...
...But the AEC revoked his clearance...
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...The most pathetic tragedies reduce the great manAlv.parody-of himself...
...He writes as if Teller were the principal supplier...
...Goodchild tells us that Teller used old friends of Reagan to lobby him for money for Livermore projects, and that he joined with General Daniel Graham's High Frontier—an outfit that promoted space-based interceptor rockets...
...They imagined that the man they were seeing was really the Edward Teller...
...Lawrence and Oppenheimer became poles apart...
...Perhaps the distinction between fact and fancy had ceased to matter...
...Oppenheimer always knew that the FBI had been suspicious of his contacts with leftist friends and mistresses...
...When the "short" X-rays produced by nuclear explosions strike metals, they stimulate the production of "long" X-rays...
...From the late 1960s on, Teller could be countedwere some sort of extension of the protagonist...
...They were much less interested in extending American power in the Pacific and not at all in providing America with leverage over the Soviet Union...
...The Turn BACK IN ACADEMIC LIFE, Teller continued to press gently for the hydrogen bomb and arguing for its feasibility while more and more of his colleagues and friends, including Fermi, were pressing for a cessation of nuclear testing and arguing that new weapons were infeasible and inadvisable...
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...S CHARLES DE GAULLE WAS LIBERATING FRANCE from Nazi Germany's puppet Vichy regime in 1944, he was asked about its head, Marshal Henri Petain—the same Petain who had been arguably France's greatest hero in World War I. Sadly, de Gaulle answered: "Petain is a great man who died circa 1926...
...Teller first dismissed the possibility because, he thought, X-rays would generate and dissipate too quickly...
...He was not a U.S...
...For whatever it was worth...
...But two years later, after the X-ray laser had been discredited, Teller turned around and lobbied for his own version of space-based interceptors, which he called "Brilliant Pebbles...
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...Teller gloried in having proven wrong those who had criticized him for advocating the impossible H-bomb...
...His world thenceforth became that of government contracting and defense policy...
...But Goodchild's treatment of this phase of Teller's life is the weakest part of his recent book...
...In the process, despite obvious left-wing biases and gaps of knowledge, the book teaches about the physics of nuclear weapons, about the intellectual insights that made them possible, and about the vicious relations among most of the brilliant people involved...
...Tragedies tell of admirable people undone by flaws...
...That is why, from the time that he went to study in Germany in 1926, senior colleagues, "gods" like Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, recognized his value as a sounding board—a man who could come up The story of a s and move them past ellectual roadblocks that others d not overcome...
...Hans Bethe attributes to Teller the insight into the proton exchanges that transform helium and carbon into one another in the heart of the sun—a major basis for his own Nobel Prize...
...He realized that very large (5-megaton) nuclear weapons fired into space in the vicinity of offensive missile warheads could be made to generate large amounts of X-rays, which would devastate said warheads over sizable areas—large enough to make up for the inaccuracies of the antimissile interceptors of those days...
...Edward adds the roof and points out the esoteric applications in the distance...
...Ever since the first human went into a dark cave and built a fire, people have realized the importance of proper indoor lighting...
...Oppenheimer was a man of the left—politically through his progressive causes and Communist friends, and socially through his womanizing...
...Conversely, wIkp - he came across someone else's implications in it that escaped ltS' aU 01...
...By contrast, when Fermi showed up at the Navy department with a letter drafted by Teller, he was announced as "a WOP...
...Often, the management asked him to speak to dinners attended by donors...
...As soon as I turned on the lamp and began to read the newspaper I could see the wondeiful difference...
...The development of chemical lasers, large optics, and fine pointing-tracking mechanisms made possible missile defense from space...
...A new biography by Peter Goodchild, Edward Teller: The Real Dr Strangelove (Harvard University Press, 352 pages, $29.95), chronicles Teller's great life and his living death...
...Common sense says that a solid mass of metal is what it is...
...Hence he concluded that it would be possible to build a thermonuclear weapon yielding the equivalent force of a million tons of TNT...
...Its 27-watt compact bulb is the equivalent to a 150-watt ordinary light bulb...
...Nevertheless he became a U.S...
...Teller's answer regarding pointing and tracking was even more outrageous: there was cheap micro-technology that made all previous approaches obsolete...
...He only hints at the problem of focusing beams of X-rays...
...There, beginning in the winter of 1943, a community of scientists worked in the national interest while enjoying each other's idiosyncrasies, including Teller's late-night piano playing...
...And he brought to bear on problems of physics and chemistry principles that others knew but had not thought of applying...
...Goodchild does not mention that Teller's lobbying also yielded some $800 million to develop a ground-based multi-megawatt Free Electron Laser that would transmit its beam through the atmosphere to space-based mirrors that would zap missiles—and that this too turned out to be a waste...
...By the time the comity of Fermi, Teller, Bethe, Bohr, Leo Zilard, and Eugene Wigner had decided topresent the U.S...
...Then in May the military simply downgraded the "super" project that had become Teller's signature contribution...
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...Teller spent the last decade and a half of his life at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where I spent a decade as a Senior Research Fellow...
...Teller was ostracized in academia...
...Teller's involvement with missile defense in the 1960s was a logical extension of his development of nuclear weapons...
...These 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2005 differences cut across networks of personal friendships and of professional interest...
...Similarly, the Edward Teller I knew in the 1980s and '90s was, in my view, a great man who had died long before...
...It would get worse...
...Strange-love," underlines the pathos...
...Teller could see solutions to mathematical problems that others could not...
...We've looked at lots of lights, but this one offers the benefit of dual light levels of 27 and 18 watts of power equivalent to 150-and 100-watt incandescent bulbs...
...Teller opposed that move and remained an advocate of missile defense all his life...
...The New York Times's military correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, Business Week, not to mention Aviation Week's military editor Clarence Robinson, had published favorable accounts of laser anti-missile technology...
...But, when pressed, he told me, in the presence of others, that experiments had narrowed beams generated by X-rays "in the micro-radian range...
...Teller tried to make Graham into a mere adjunct to his lobbying for the X-ray laser...
...Not so...
...Goodchild, following William Broad's 1992 book, Teller's War, truly tells us in general that the entire X-ray laser project was a fraudulent extrapolation of a single physical phenomenon into a whole weapons system...
...Teller also introduced him to his wife-to-be...
...But retribution against its opponents happened only because some people, including Teller, wanted it...
...And if so, could not the chain reaction produce enormous amounts of energy...
...But further calculations convinced him otherwise...
...Since 1980 Congress had voted twice overwhelmingly to build space laser weapons as quickly as possible, and added money to the Defense budget for that purpose...
...government with the possibility of creating an atom bomb, French colleagues had duplicated their experiments and German ones were being encouraged by their government...
Vol. 38 • October 2005 • No. 8
