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A review by mburnamfink
The Teller's War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception by William J. Broad
5.0
Broad knows what's up with missile defense. As the New York Times science correspondent during the 80s, he was close to many of the principles in various stabs at Star Wars during the Reagan administration. The prime mover was Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, founder of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the conservative doyen of nuclear scientific clientage. For all his successes, Teller had a checkered record as a scientist. The mainstream academic community had turned against him in the 1950s over his betrayal of Oppenheimer during the Red Scare. He hadn't made a major scientific contribution on the order of his Manhattan Project peers. And the public regarded him as a Dr. Strangelove-esque madman who's plans for peaceful hydrogen bombs had come to nothing.
In this climate, Teller grabbed onto the scientifically advanced bomb-pumped X-Ray laser as a way to defeat the Soviet nuclear arsenal, shield America from mutually assured destruction, and ensure his place in the history books. Theoretically, the X-ray laser could amplify an H-bomb into beams of coherent light billions of times brighter than the blast itself, shooting 100,000s of independently targetable beams at a nuclear strike. Theoretically. Engineering this thing would be a nightmare, as the whole apparatus existed for only a nanosecond next to an exploding hydrogen bomb.
Teller's optimism, vision, and passion were his greatest assets as a scientific leader, but in this case they lead to his downfall, as Teller oversold Reagan on the potential of the X-ray laser. The narrative mostly follows Roy Woodruff, the nuclear scientist in charge of the X-ray laser program, and his attempts to properly inform the Reagan administration and the public about the serious limits and uncertainties around Star Wars in the face of Teller's PR campaign and scorched earth bureaucratic warfare.
The story of Star Wars is bigger than just Teller and Woodruff, but Broad's framing is essentially correct, and provides a gripping and technically accurate account of some of the most fraught science politics in recent memory.
In this climate, Teller grabbed onto the scientifically advanced bomb-pumped X-Ray laser as a way to defeat the Soviet nuclear arsenal, shield America from mutually assured destruction, and ensure his place in the history books. Theoretically, the X-ray laser could amplify an H-bomb into beams of coherent light billions of times brighter than the blast itself, shooting 100,000s of independently targetable beams at a nuclear strike. Theoretically. Engineering this thing would be a nightmare, as the whole apparatus existed for only a nanosecond next to an exploding hydrogen bomb.
Teller's optimism, vision, and passion were his greatest assets as a scientific leader, but in this case they lead to his downfall, as Teller oversold Reagan on the potential of the X-ray laser. The narrative mostly follows Roy Woodruff, the nuclear scientist in charge of the X-ray laser program, and his attempts to properly inform the Reagan administration and the public about the serious limits and uncertainties around Star Wars in the face of Teller's PR campaign and scorched earth bureaucratic warfare.
The story of Star Wars is bigger than just Teller and Woodruff, but Broad's framing is essentially correct, and provides a gripping and technically accurate account of some of the most fraught science politics in recent memory.