I mean, Oppenheimer at least seemed to regret what he did. Teller on the other hand was completely remorseless and unhinged.
we should build the bomb to prove the concept, we dont know how bad itll be once we drop it
“yeah but what if we make it 100x more powerful”
100x (1.5Mt range) was done and is still fielded (1.2Mt, B83), but teller wanted to make 1000000x bigger one (10 gigaton range). it was based on a flawed understanding of several things in thermonuclear weapons but teller never let it go. the bit that worked was done by somebody else (stanisław ulam)
Youre right of course, I was more getting at how teller wanted to skip the first entirely and go for the “super”
teller also wanted to make it a salted bomb but this is nonsense and not how neutrons work at these energies
and also stole credit, and clinged to his ideas after being proven wrong because these were his ideas
I don’t know. If you know better and you still do it, isn’t that worse?
He was an incredibly smart man, and I’m sure this kept him up at night. If you haven’t, I would suggest going to listen/watch some interviews with him and you might get some insight as to where his mind was at.
One thing that really stuck with me was one thing he said “Failure is an inevitability of sucess”.
