Teller and Nukes: Real Dr. Strangelove or Scientist Who Knew Sin?

"I just could not understand why our surroundings had changed so greatly in one instant... I thought it might have been something which had nothing to do with the war—the collapse of the earth which it is said would take place at the end of the world, and which I had read about as a child..."

"There were dead bodies everywhere. There was practically no room for me to put my feet on the floor. At that time I couldn't figure out the reason why all these people were suffering or what illness it was that had struck them down... There was no light at all, and we were just like sleep walkers..."

"My immediate thought was that this was like the hell I had always read about. I had never seen anything which resembled it before. But I thought that should there be a hell, this was it."

—First-hand accounuts of the atomic bombs.

In a metaphorical sense, I first encountered Edward Teller as a relatively young man. Right around the time of the end of high school, I remember reading The Demon-Haunted world by Carl Sagan in some woods by the play fields in the area I grew up in. That was where I was when I read the bit about Teller as 'the scientist who knew sin.' (I read the part about how the Reagan Administration mishandled the HIV/AIDS crisis by bringing it up during a car ride with my folks, where I was told Sagan was an idiot who didn't understand how unacceptable it was to be gay, so of course there wouldn't be research done on "the gay disease" in the eighties).

Later, I took a creative writing class with Shawn Wong at UW (I'm sorry if you see this, Shawn, but ever since class I have, and still, suspect you edit your own Wikipedia albums, that main picture looks like something from a personal photo album to me). He mentioned an encounter with Teller—I believe it might've been at a gas station or something? Being the jackass I am, I brought up Sagan's commentary on Teller and turned a fun, "I bumped into this famous person!" story into, "So, you mean the guy who Carl Sagan lambasted as an example of a basically real-life mad, evil scientist?"

It spiced up the class for the day, which, well: cool story, one of his books got made into a movie. And once when he was standing in line for coffee, he thought a woman asking to cut in line was coming onto him as a writer and thought he was gonna get some. He didn't. Oh, and when he was young, he lived in the same place briefly as James Joyce and met his landlady. That's three cool stories. That he told like, weekly.*

Now, that's a pretty light intermission, cause the rest of this isn't going to be so light. Nuclear weapons, unfortunately, remain a pressing issue.

I believe it might be Sagan again, but in A Path Where No Man Thought, who describes nuclear war as a bit like two opponents standing in a room filled with gasoline, pouring more in, and each one has a pack of matches. Whoever ignites, everyone's dead. This is why dying nutjobs like Putin, who have nothing to lose, are willing to play this card in desperation. It's why North Korea has spent so much time striving to acquire a nuclear weapon.

(Some of the conclusions A Path Where No Man Thought draws regarding nuclear winter have been shown to be inaccurate or misleading—respect to Sagan, who openly acknowledges this in at least one writing after the book was released; the burning of Kuwait's oil fields in the early nineties produced similar circumstances that allowed scientists to measure real-world rather than theoretical application of formulae).

I suppose this could be a fitting time to provide some background or humanity to Teller, such as him fleeing the nazis and coming to the US, or his persecution complex, or about the reasons behind his philosophy but—at the end of the day, Teller pursued power. To catastrophic ends. The atomic bomb was an awful enough weapon on its own that makes one question the worth of splitting the atom or if it was a Pandora's box intelligent people already rue and someday everyone is going to rue?

But, in classic InGen style, the scientists behind the drive to create the big bomb were, "So eager to see if they could they never took the time to ask if they should."

Well, they did. But the military decision was: "As long as it's a bigger weapon, we are going to pursue it, that's what the military does."

So, Oppenheimer is demonized and hounded out of the nuclear program. After all, he was leaning more toward pacifism and questioning the bomb—while Teller, on the other hand, wanted to go from the Atomic Bomb to the Super or Hydrogen Bomb. This further morphed, ultimately, into Reagan's SDI, which was based on mockups that were complete theoretical bullshit, not to mention all sorts of other nutty plans like wanting to create an artificial harbor in Alaska or other massive testing projects.

There's a sort of mystique that's been built up around nuclear weapons and radioactive waste thanks to all sorts of post-apocalyptic games, movies, TV shows, and the like from Mad Max to BioShock. Hell, even your friendly neighborhood Spiderman got his powers from a nuclear spider or was that just the Toby Mcguire version?

That's not how radiation works. Radiation is a painful, slow, agonizing death most times, which we caught a glimpse of above. And in a situation with nuclear winds, in a post-apocalypse: I don't think these exploratory, adventurous stories really reflect what it'd likely turn into.

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

—Albert Einstein

Nevil Shute wrote On the Beach (unrelated to the Chris Rea song I for some reason associate with it) back in 1957 and is quite prescient; I read it much, much later, while working at AmazonFresh's Bellevue location in the mid-2010s. The book also, fun little tidbit, includes mentions of some areas I grew up around; it's pretty cool, you don't bump into them often. Though, given the context, maybe not so fun or cool at all...

Set in Australia, the book follows a setup not too different from what Sagan's book would predict. After a nuclear war has decimated life in the Northern Hemisphere, we follow a group of survivors in Australia as the nuclear winds spread toward them. It's not a matter of if they'll survive this; it's a matter of when they'll die and, like a terminal cancer patient, choosing what to do with the time left to them.

If you're more into the post-apocalyptic craziness, you've got a group of characters that decide their big blowout is gonna be a big car race, no-holds barred—and hey, if you die, better to go out doing what you love. Some people are probably like those of us who are a bit more indecisive and, unsure of what else to do, they try to go about their day-to-day lives as they had before because going through these routines is enough to bring some semblance of comfort.

Nobody lives. Nobody can.**

It's a tragic, heart-wrenching ending. It's also gotta be one of the most powerful books I've ever read.

Speaking of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer said, "The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose."

Teller would later rebut, claiming scientists had not known sin but "have known power."

Nobel physicist Isidor Rabi, a contemporary of Teller’s, said, “He is a danger to all that is important. I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller.”

Lord Acton reminds us, "Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Once more, to Sagan, from 1980:

"The conventional bombs of World War II were called "blockbusters", filled with 20 tons of TNT they could destroy a city block. All the bombs dropped on all the cities during World War II amounted to some 2 million tons of TNT—two megatons. Coventry, Rotterdam, Dresden and Tokyo—all the death that rained from the skies between 1939 and 1945—a hundred thousand blockbusters, two megatons. Today, two megatons is the equivalent of a single thermonuclear bomb—one bomb with the destructive force of the second world war. But there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. The missile and bomber forces in the Soviet Union and United States have warheads aimed at over 15,000 designated targets. No place on the planet is safe.

The energy contained in these weapons—genies of death, patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps -- totals far more than 10,000 megatons; but, with the destruction concentrated efficiently, not over six years but over a few hours. A blockbuster for every family on the planet; a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon."

—

*If I'm ever in the mood, I'll have to either dig up or just tell the story beginning-to-end of the incident I fictionalized for my story for that creative writing class. It involves—oh, what's the best way to put this?—a then-opioid addict, a couple of potheads, a dildo, some very tasteless decisions, and an incredibly uncomfortable drive to a pawn shop. The enormous pink dildo is the lynchpin of the whole thing. Dildos are funny. (I once had a conversation with pals who were big into Mortal Kombat at the time; they were discussing what their grisly “Finish Him!” would be if they were an in-game character. I said mine would be a double-ended dilly because “what could be more insulting than beating someone with a dildo?” and baffled the room before the insults about being a fag started).

**While billionaires pursue things like Thiel's injecting young blood or creating artificial AI and uploading it into a computer like that Twilight Zone episode, or cryo-freezing heads like The X-Files (has someone gone the full nine-yards and tried to create a fake body? I'd love to throw a mocking comparison to The Prestige or Star Wars on here), it’s delusional when Thiel speaks about rejecting the “ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.”

Everybody dies.

—Netflix's Dark Tourist has an episode 'The Stans,' which includes a visit to a Russian orphanage with children that have been impacted by nearby nuclear explosions that were done for testing. It's a heart-wrenching view of radiation's lingering, unforeseen consequences.

—As previously mentioned, Sagan, it should be noted, is not infallible, nor is anyone. Look at his interactions with one Dr. Lilly. Lilly, of course, is known for an infamous attempt to get dolphins to speak English for inter-species communication. The theory of dolphin speech led to a book written under the influence of amphetamines and culminated in a female doctor giving a dolphin hand and foot jobs among other things.

I think it also gave Sega the idea for Ecco the Dolphin, but I may have just assumed that when I was high.

—Oh. I guess it might be relevant that when I took the ASVAB, the Navy wanted me as a nuclear tech. Bonus, even, if I dropped outta college. I’m an indecisive man. I passed, and today, I’m proud I did.