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Hungarian-American physicist, Edward Teller (1908-2003), helped to develop the atomic bomb and provided the theoretical framework for the hydrogen bomb. He remained a staunch advocate of nuclear power, calling for the development of advanced thermonuclear weapons. [Listener: John H. Nuckolls]

TRANSCRIPT: What happened was that then, in early 1950, we had been planning a number of tests for the next year, for the spring of 1951. Everybody agreed that for that test series we should gather as much information as ever possible, and I, having planned to go back to Chicago in the summer of 1950, I now made up my mind. There was a possibility of the hydrogen bomb. I was at least going to stay another year. We planned, we calculated, and among the calculations a job done by one of my colleagues, Stan Ulam, was particularly important. There had been calculations about the planned hydrogen bomb which were, I have to admit, superficial. Ulam and his collaborators did not have a good a computing machine available, they did things by hand, and Ulam's collaborators did a very good job and found difficulties. In fact in their formulation which I don't think was really quite as definite as it should have been. But in their formulation our plans just wouldn't work.

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