Edward Teller

"Enemy of humanity"

Edward Teller, the physicist known as the father of the hydrogen bomb for his role in the development of nuclear weapons died in California today, aged 95. His work on the hydrogen bomb provided the linchpin of the MAD (mutually assured destruction) defense doctrine.

After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, Dr. Teller continued to campaign for research on a fusion bomb, despite widespread opposition from the physics community — including Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had been his superior on the Manhattan Project — on technical, political, and humanitarian grounds.

The 1944 Nobel Prize-winner, Isidor Isaac Rabi, said, "I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller.... I think he is an enemy of humanity."

Never one to allow his commitment to scientific advances to outweigh their human consequences, Dr. Teller accelerated the arms race by championing research into more powerful hydrogen bombs than the one that he pioneered (itself 2,500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb) and which the United States detonated in the Pacific in November 1952.

In The Search for Sri Krishna, Srila Sridhar Maharaj says: "So-called scientific advancement is suicidal. And it is clearly proven: presently the leading countries of the world are threatening each other with atomic weapons, the highest product of the scientists."

In a 1987 interview, Dr. Teller arrogantly asserted: "We would be unfaithful to the tradition of Western civilization if we shied away from exploring what man can accomplish, if we failed to increase man's control over nature."

In The Search for Sri Krishna, Srila Sridhar Maharaj warns: "This is a suicidal civilization. The whole civilization is rotten to the bottom. They are exploiting nature for the apparent good of human society, but it is incurring a loan from nature that must be paid to the [cent] with interest.... So, this civilization is anti-civilization."