But Edward Teller has kept his booming voice, his Hungarian accent and his strong views. He can recall as easily as last night's dinner what it was like to lie in the New Mexico desert in the predawn darkness on July 16, 1945, waiting for the first test of an atomic bomb. He had spent the previous two years at the secret government lab at Los Alamos working on the weapon that would help end World War II and change the world forever.

"I was violating the regulations — lying there as suggested, not lying with my back to the bomb, but facing it," he says. For protection, he had smeared on suntan lotion, put on sunglasses and welder's glasses, then shielded the sides of his face with gloved hands. He raises his hands, trembling now, to show just how.

The blast had been delayed for hours because of rain. Then the countdown resumed.

"The countdown went to 30 seconds and then stopped, giving one the impression that perhaps it had been postponed again," he says. "In the end, it went off after 30 seconds that seemed to me like an eternity." He watched the explosion through the dark shield of the welder's glasses.

"My first reaction very clearly was, 'Is that all?' " he says, and laughs. "And my second reaction, after one or two seconds, was that I removed the welder's glasses and peeked out; I saw it was as illuminated as in daytime." He watched the light fade and the clouds rise.

"I was deeply impressed," he says. "And I knew that the next time it would be used in a way about which I was doubtful, it was the right thing to do."

Now he argues that the scientists should have worked out the technical details to explode the bomb over Tokyo Bay, a terrifying display that might have persuaded Japan to surrender without causing all those deaths in Hiroshima.

But Teller is unapologetic about his work. And he believes his stubborn insistence on the need for the United States to develop the much more powerful hydrogen bomb in the 1950s was also the right thing to do in the face of a growing Soviet threat.

No regrets

He has had a lifetime of controversy. His ambivalent testimony in 1954 on J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, helped cost Oppenheimer his security clearance and Teller many friendships. He opposed the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and championed the missile defense shield to a receptive President Reagan in the 1980s. He helped found the nation's second nuclear weapons lab, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and still visits there twice a week in his wheelchair.

Does he have any regrets?

"My answer is very simple," he replies. "It is a two-letter word: No."

No regrets, perhaps, but the Oppenheimer affair still rankles. Nearly a half-century later, he quotes by memory from his testimony, arguing that his colleagues were unfair in accusing him of betrayal. "They had to get somebody to blame for Oppenheimer losing his clearance," he complains, "and I was a convenient person to blame."

He is lying in a blue recliner placed near a window in the living room of his home on the Stanford campus, where he has been affiliated for two decades with the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank. He wears a red sweatshirt with "AMERICA" written across the front, his legs tucked beneath a plaid blanket. A friend has been reading aloud the Hungarian galleys of his memoirs to him to check on the translation.

Stacked at the front door are boxes of the new book, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Perseus Publishing, $35), written with Judith Shoolery. The front cover shows a black-and-white photo of Teller as a young man in profile, hair flopping over his forehead, and his distinctively bushy eyebrows.

He has outlived his mentors

These days, it is easier for him to remember the past than to talk about the future. He can no longer read — "I miss that a great deal," he says — and it is difficult for him to hear newscasts. He relies on friends for information about the Sept. 11 attacks and the war on terrorism.
He asks his interviewer to read aloud the dedication in his book, which cites four Hungarian-American scientists with whom he had spent a lifetime. He was a student at gymnasium — high school — in Budapest when he first met three of them.

Now he has outlived them all.

"... to Theodore von Karman ..." He asks, "Do you know who he was?" No. "He was responsible for the American possession of an Air Force," he says with some annoyance at the reporter's ignorance.

" ... Leo Szilard ..." What about him? No. "He was the first man on our side who proposed at a very young age to use uranium fission." Szilard also helped persuade Albert Einstein to sign a letter urging President Franklin Roosevelt to support development of a nuclear weapon. "I provided an important role by driving him to Einstein's house on Long Island, because he did not have a driver's license," Teller says with a laugh. "So I had an important role as Szilard's driver."

" ... Eugene Wigner ..." What did he do? The interviewer is clueless. "He won the Nobel Prize," Teller exclaims, his dismay at her ignorance growing.

"... John von Neumann ..." Well? "Not even Johnny?" Teller asks, berating the reporter's "very bad education" or possibly her failure to pay attention in class.

"About Johnny you should find out. He was the best, I claim he was the best mathematician in the 20th century," a key figure in the development of computers.

They called themselves "the Martians," this group of Hungarian ιmigrιs who helped form the core of America's nuclear program at a critical time. They came to describe themselves as extraterrestrials who claimed a foreign homeland to provide an explanation for their hopeless accents.

"If I am proud of anything, I am proud of belonging to that group," Teller says.

Then he sinks into silence and memories

Post Extras