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The man who knew power A look at one of the key figures in the development of the atomic bomb. Edward Teller: the Real Dr Strangelove by Peter Goodchild Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 2004. 352 pp. £25 To be published in the US by Harvard University Press
More than twenty years ago, Peter Goodchild, a television producer at the BBC, wrote a book about J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb. Now he turns his attention to the man who became Oppenheimer's foe, the nuclear-weapons physicist and policy adviser Edward Teller, who died last year. The book on Teller is a useful, although error-prone, popular history that should help to guide the writing of more scholarly, probing, careful and better volumes. In the interim, this engaging biography will stand as the best single book on Teller's whole life.
The book is largely fluent, often gripping, sometimes insightful and occasionally poignant - in short, it is a good read. However, it sometimes understates its dependence on other published works, notably Gregg Herken's Brotherhood of the Bomb (Henry Holt, 2002), which devotes about 100 pages to Teller.
One of the most controversial US scientists of the post-war years, Teller was a Hungarian emigre of Jewish descent who went to the United States in 1935. He is best known to the public and much of the science world not for his formal contributions to theoretical physics, but for his efforts on, and disputes about, nuclear weapons and nuclear policy. These included his campaign for the hydrogen bomb, his negative testimony in 1954 when...