Appreciating Edward Teller

Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this evehanded and interesting appreciation at Physics Today for the controversial "father of the H Bomb," Edward Teller.

A snippet:

close to Teller's heart were two causes that might surprise those who knew him only in caricature. One was his dislike of secrecy, especially in technical matters. Teller saw secrecy as harmful to the US in a fundamental way. It lessened the key American advantage of broad, free discussion and criticism while it assisted closed societies, which were better at maintaining secrecy. One of his examples was the nuclear weapons program itself. He maintained that the Soviet program was ahead of ours precisely because of US secrecy. At the same time, he argued, the US was forging ahead of the Soviets on other defense initiatives that were not so highly classified.

Whole thing here.