Teller`s War:
The Top-Secret Story Behind The Star Wars Deception
By William J. Broad
Simon & Schuster, 350 pages, $25
In years to come, as the Cold War receives its deserved reassessment, few stories will provide more instruction for historians than that of physicist Edward Teller. The career of the Hungarian-born, now 84-year-old Teller reveals that the costliest ”war” in history was so disruptive of our collective judgment that, in the end, even the truths of science were overwhelmed by the imperatives of politics.
Again and again in the nearly half-century since the end of World War II, Teller has gone over the heads of scientific colleagues and into the corridors of Washington to lobby for some pet scheme: the hydrogen bomb in 1950, a weapons laboratory of his own in 1952, the so-called ”clean bomb” in 1957. Each time he frightened his auditors by telling them ”the Russians are ahead.” And nearly every time he got what he was campaigning for.
In this book, William Broad, science reporter for The New York Times, gives the story behind the selling of Star Wars, a story that must surely spell the end of the Teller saga. No diatribe, but rather a carefully researched and documented account, the book is a devastating indictment of Teller-and of Ronald Reagan, the president he seduced.
The seduction began in November 1980, a few days after Reagan`s election, not in Washington but under the desert in Nevada, where scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory conducted the first successful test of a device called the X-ray laser. A few months later, as Reagan settled into the White House and the new budget cycle began, three of the laboratory`s leaders flew to Washington to brief members of the House Armed Services Committee about the promising new weapon. The three were Teller, ”Father of the H-bomb,” his 39-year-old protege Lowell Wood, and 40-year-old Roy Woodruff, the lab`s associate director for nuclear weapons.
In the years that followed, Teller frequently went to Washington, often accompanied by Wood, to brief high officials about the newest
”breakthrough.” Most of those officials-among them William Clark, Reagan`s national security adviser; Clark`s deputy, Robert C. McFarlane; Adm. James D. Watkins, then chief of naval operations; and William Casey, director of CIA-knew little about science or technology but were spellbound by Teller`s charm, his ebullient promises and his invocation of the Soviet threat. Very often the effect of a secret Teller briefing was amplified by a well-timed story in Aviation Week and Space Technology (a magazine known in military circles as ”Aviation Leak”) that outlined the latest claims for the laser and the amount of money required for further tests.
Teller`s campaign reached a climax in September 1982, when he was admitted to the Oval Office. There, with ”his usual theatric flair,” says Broad, the physicist described for a receptive Ronald Reagan the way beams flashing from the X-ray laser could wipe out incoming enemy missiles.
The major effect of Teller`s visit was Reagan`s speech of March 23, 1983, announcing a new national policy to develop weapons of defense that could intercept Soviet missiles and render nuclear weapons ”impotent and obsolete.” The program, which had at its center the space-based X-ray laser, was promptly and skeptically christened ”Star Wars.”
The trouble with Star Wars, as originally promulgated by Reagan, was that claims for the X-ray laser, the device at its heart, had been wildly overblown. A year after Reagan`s speech, a Livermore scientist named George Maenchen wrote a pair of secret reports concluding that the brightness measurements of all X-ray laser tests to date had been flawed; a 1985 Los Alamos study confirmed Maenchen`s findings. By now, Broad says, ”the stage was set for chaos,” with Maenchen, Los Alamos and an internal Livermore report all warning that the laser was too dim to do the job and Teller and Lowell Wood claiming that the laser was ”on the verge of an advance that would make it a trillion times brighter than a hydrogen bomb.”
Enter Roy Woodruff, the Livermore lab official responsible for work on the laser. In late 1983, he indirectly learned of a secret letter on lab stationery from Teller to Reagan`s science adviser, George Keyworth-a Teller protege-asking for increased funding for the laser on the ground that ”we are now entering the engineering phase.” Aware that such a step was years away, if feasible at all, Woodruff demanded that Teller send a corrective letter to Keyworth. Teller refused. ”My reputation would be ruined,” he reportedly said. Woodruff then drafted such a letter but was forbidden to send it by the lab director, Roger Batzel, another Teller protege.
A similar scenario was played out a year later, after secret letters had been sent by Teller to Paul Nitze, Reagan`s senior arms control adviser, and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane. This time Batzel said the federal establishment knew enough about Teller`s exuberance to discount his visionary claims.
Worried about the laser`s ”false brightness” and other shortcomings, and fearful lest the lab lose credibility because of its failure to stand up to Teller and Wood, Woodruff resigned on October 30, 1985. He was transferred to a lesser job, and the curious were told that he was suffering ”a midlife crisis.” But before the year was out, a new test showed that the laser`s brightness was one-tenth what had been previously believed.
Even after the X-ray laser`s demise, Teller continued to rule the 8,000-person lab. Among most scientists, his reputation was in ruins, but neither the White House nor the public seemed to know it. Protected by secrecy and by bureaucratic amnesia about his 40-year track record, Teller still had the will and clout to pursue any vision that beckoned.
What induced Teller to betray scientific truth? Broad`s answer is that throughout his career Teller`s best work was done with collaborators, that even more than most scientists he ”needed peers to give intellectual integrity to the wanderings of his extraordinarily vivid imagination.” And after the mid-1950s, when many colleagues wrote him off because of his role in the fall of Robert Oppenheimer, Teller surrounded himself not with scientific equals but with generals, politicians and younger acolytes. A further point, barely touched on here, is that Teller, lacking inner restraints, was encouraged in his excesses by the politicians and military men who profited from them.
If I have a criticism of Broad, it is that he does not deal much with the question of why successive U.S. presidents bought Teller`s voodoo physics. Indeed, the story did not end with Ronald Reagan. President Bush, in his State of the Union address, asked increased funding for Star Wars, which now incorporates the latest Teller fantasy, called Brilliant Pebbles. Now that the USSR has crumbled and the Cold War is receding into the mists of time, perhaps the source of Teller`s immense influence is a riddle for the historians of the future to solve.
