Authors: Brian Van DeMark
Rabi’s old sparring partner, Edward Teller, became the bête noire of liberals, who caricatured him as an amoral and unbalanced scientist. Teller’s volatile temperament and forbidding appearance contributed to this impression. Always headstrong, he was quick to denounce any and all who opposed him. To a physicist who challenged him on arms control, he said: “You’re either stupid or you’re treasonous, and I know you’re not stupid.”
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His heavy eyebrows grew even bushier as he aged, giving him the shadowy, almost fierce countenance of the diabolical scientist. He talked with a deep voice in a strong, well-enunciated cadence with an accent that was part European university professor, part Cold War inquisitor, and part Bela Lugosi.
Teller’s efforts to make amends for his testimony against Oppenheimer got him nowhere. Ostracized within the physics community after 1954, Teller had made new friends, this time among the military, financiers, industrialists, and conservative politicians. He became an ally and a symbol of the American Right—the only one of the nine physicists to do so. It was not long before he was writing and speechifying like the best of them. The higher he flew with the hawks, the more it seemed to compensate for his ostracism by his peers—and the more he was impelled to justify and rationalize his actions. It was a hard and wearying journey.
Lewis Strauss once said that there were three kinds of physicists: theoretical, applied, and political. Teller was the most political of them all. He became extraordinarily well connected, often gaining access to the highest councils of government denied to scientists of lesser note.
Time
featured him on the cover of its November 18, 1957, issue, presenting Teller in a four-page story as the shining example of U.S. science at its best because he, more than any of his peers, had recognized the accelerating pace of Russian scientific achievement before sputnik. Like many Americans of the time, he was staunchly anticommunist. There was no weapon big enough to make him sleep well in a world where the Soviet Union existed. He was given to doom-laden pronouncements about communists taking over the earth and believed it a fatal fallacy that the West could be protected by enunciating moral principles while remaining militarily vulnerable.
As a result, Teller became a leading critic of all arms control initiatives, beginning with his fight against a nuclear test moratorium in the late 1950s. Eisenhower, at first favorably disposed toward a moratorium, was partly dissuaded when Teller came to the White House and told him that with continued testing the United States could develop “clean” (fallout free) weapons and that the Soviets could negate any moratorium by undetectable clandestine tests. If America was behind, Teller reasoned, it had to test to catch up; and if it was ahead, it had to test to stay there. As usual, Teller committed himself in an all-or-nothing way. To rally public support, he wrote, lectured, and engaged in radio and television debates with pro-test-ban spokesmen; to rally scientific backing, he helped devise experiments to show how the Russians could cheat on a test-ban agreement if they wanted to; to keep the Livermore lab on its toes in weapons development and ready for testing, he took direct charge of operations there.
The accumulated strains of overwork, added to the animosities that he felt increasingly surrounded him, began to take their toll, both physically and emotionally. His health deteriorated. His ulcerative colitis required daily doses of medicine and a doctor-ordered diet, frustrating for a man who had always devoured food with gusto. To a friend he wrote: “On my last medical checkup it was found that I have the same trouble as Ernest. It is a good thing to imitate him, but it seems I am carrying it too far. I have resigned from many of the things I am now doing and will have to lead a more quiet life.”
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His frustration was compounded by continuous concern for the fate of family members he had left behind in Hungary. Their experiences under communist rule were bitter, and they helped to harden the mistrust and hostility he felt toward the Soviets well into his later years. His former zest now gave way to somberness and black moods of near despair. The more opposition that he encountered, the more relentlessly he drove himself to overcome it—and the more impatient and irritable he became. As his isolation grew, so did his stubbornness, irascibility, and sense of self-importance.
The debate over the Limited Test Ban Treaty—which sought to end hazardous radiation fallout from nuclear explosions in the atmosphere—roused Teller’s temper to a fever pitch. The treaty, which had the backing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was submitted to the Senate for ratification on August 9, 1963. Eleven days later, on August twentieth, Teller appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Members of the Armed Services Committee and the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy also attended. Teller’s testimony was presented without any prepared text or notes and was delivered with his usual great force and conviction. Largely for this reason he received far more attention from press and television than any other witness. He told the senators that the treaty would not make it more difficult for Russia to catch up, as some of its proponents had claimed, because “it is by no means certain that the United States is ahead of the Soviet Union in the field of nuclear explosives.”
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He added that the treaty should not be passed because the Russians would secretly cheat—they might even do tests behind the moon. He ended by warning the senators that if they ratified the treaty, “You will have given away the future safety of our country and increased the dangers of war.”
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When asked his reaction to Teller’s testimony, President Kennedy replied, “It would be very difficult to satisfy Dr. Teller in this field.”
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The Senate agreed with Kennedy, ratifying the Limited Test Ban Treaty on September 23, 1963, by an overwhelming vote of eighty to nineteen. No country has detonated a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere since.
During his last years at Columbia, Rabi taught a course called Philosophical and Social Implications of Twentieth-Century Physics. In it, Rabi tried to show the importance of science to modern life. To Rabi, physics was not mysterious—it was an inspiring quest, a great game—and the playing field was the universe itself. “You’re playing with a champ,” he told students. “You’re trying to find out how God made the world, just like Jacob wrestling with the angel.”
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Rabi wanted people to understand scientists: their hopes and fears, their motivations and insecurities, how they thought and worked, in order to see them as flesh-and-blood human beings. To Rabi, scientists were not remote; they had “a vital role—sometimes one thinks of it as a fatal role” to play in the affairs of the world, he would say.
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But Rabi increasingly worried that those around him were specialists—technicians, really—who ignored the larger significance of their work. The increasing abstractions of modern physics were leading to less, not more, engagement with the world.
Rabi taught his last class in the spring of 1967, ending a forty-year career at Columbia. He had not enjoyed a reputation as a great lecturer and was feared by students as a tough taskmaster, but he was admired—as he had always been—for his moral integrity and an impeccable taste that set a style for the study of physics. He told his final class that American nuclear power was so vast that it was distorting human relationships. “Just because we got there first,” he said, “doesn’t mean that we should have the power of life and death over the whole world. When you get that powerful you begin to lose pity for the human condition.” He closed on the theme of power and responsibility. “I have spent most of my time in directions that would help us diminish our responsibility—relieve us of this burden” of power over life and death of nations, he said. “Although I have worked very hard,” he added, “I have not been very successful.”
Retirement held no professional terrors for Rabi, who retained his close connection with Columbia’s physics department. But he knew his time on the frontier of physics had passed. “I keep somewhat in touch with it,” he observed, “but not in a creative way. I’m always afraid of being a stuffed shirt—making do with pretense rather than actuality.”
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In retirement, Rabi watched as the superpowers continued to build up their nuclear stockpiles to absurd levels. He became discouraged, then dejected, and finally angry. He felt America’s blind reliance on military strength threatened the ethical principles on which that strength rested. “Americans are a moral people. They have respect for human life even where there are differences of opinion,” he stressed.
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Rabi declared that every military and political leader in the world with responsibility for nuclear weapons ought to observe in person, as he had, at least one detonation of a nuclear weapon, believing the effect would be so overpowering, so frightening and terrifying, that a sane person could draw only one conclusion: that these weapons must never be used and the only way to ensure that was to abolish them.
Teller’s image as a hawk in the 1960s and 1970s was balanced by his repeated calls for scientific openness. He made these requests with deep feeling in the face of bitter criticism from those who assailed him as the mastermind of a ruinous arms race and a mad scientist fixated on mass destruction, some of whom disrupted his talks with raucous shouts of “War Criminal!” (In 1970, radical students burned him in effigy a half block from his Berkeley home.) Teller passionately advocated the abolition of secrecy surrounding scientific research, including classified nuclear work. He argued that open scientific work was necessary “so we can clearly understand what we are talking about” in the growing debate over the impact of science and technology on society—a debate that had aroused in many people a sentiment against technology.
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“In a time of rapid development,” he proclaimed on another occasion, “the greatest danger is ignorance.”
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By the time he turned seventy in 1978, Teller had experienced so much conflict that it seemed there could hardly be room for any more. But his indomitable will and technological exuberance fed his restless ambition, and he continued to promote big new ideas. Not all of his ideas seemed sensible to others. For example, he conceived that superbombs could be used to dig a sea-level waterway across Central America as an alternative to the Panama Canal. He also assumed a leading role in pushing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”) during the 1980s, the conservative years of Reagan, whose fierce anticommunism matched Teller’s own. Teller lobbied congressmen and administration officials indefatigably on behalf of the SDI. He looked on the SDI—an X-ray laser-based antimissile shield—as a silver bullet of sorts. If the United States could defend itself against nuclear missile attack, Teller reasoned, then it would not need to negotiate with the Soviet Union and it could move from a strategy of mutual assured destruction (popularly known as MAD) to a strategy of assured survival. He also was driven by guilt, confessing to an interviewer that “a good part, an important part, of my own psychology” was trying to negate, with antimissile arms, the horror of nuclear annihilation he had helped to give the world.
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A theory that might or might not become a reality after years of research, SDI had many problems, not the least of which was Teller’s tendency to minimize technical problems, to make extravagant claims, and to describe hypothetical outcomes as if they were virtual accomplishments. Critics began calling Teller “the original E.T.” and accused him of wanting to create a “pin-ball outer-space war.”
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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.”
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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: