Memoirs by Edward Teller, Perseus, £24.99/$35,
ISBN 1903985129 (January in Britain)
DIRECTOR Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, anti-hero of the eponymous 1963
movie and epitome of the mad nuclear scientist, was allegedly modelled in part
on the Hungarian-American physicist Edward Teller. Widely considered to be
“father of the H-bomb”—a description that Teller believes is in “bad
taste”—he has long been the scientist that bien pensant liberals love to
hate.
Teller cheerfully admits to being “a monomaniac with several manias”, as
Enrico Fermi put it. Teller’s manias were the desirability of nuclear energy,
the value of nuclear weapons as deterrents,…
