The recent death of 95-year-old nuclear physicist Edward Teller deprived the United States of one of its most influential and controversial scientists.

	Matt Freed/Post-Gazette
	Astro Teller, who is founder of BodyMedia, is the grandson of Edward Teller, one of the nation's most influential and controversial scientists.

It deprived Astro Teller of a grandfather.

The chief executive officer of Downtown-based body monitoring company BodyMedia Inc., Astro Teller is still mourning the loss of a man known to the world as the "father" of the hydrogen bomb. For Astro, the images of a mushroom cloud and the Cold War arms race do not square with the person he grew close to at holidays and family gatherings, the charismatic man who read him Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales in Danish, talked to him about the philosophy of life and tested him on theoretical solutions to the world's problems.

Not surprisingly, Astro Teller remains extremely protective of his grandfather, two weeks after his death.

"Understandably, he is connected in people's minds with the image of the mushroom cloud," Astro Teller said. "It is a very powerful and disturbing image, and he deserves to be connected with it, in positive and negative ways. But without knowing more about him, one would draw the emotional connection" between the destruction caused by the bomb and Teller's moral responsibility for what happened.

Drawing such a connection, Astro Teller said, "is nonsense."

Not only was his grandfather "no war hawk," according to Astro Teller, but he was a man who "had two overriding passions in his life: physics and human freedom."

Born a Hungarian in 1908, his Edward Teller was a witness to the rise of communism in his home country and later, the ascension of the Nazis in Germany. Due to his upbringing, Teller "had really cemented in his mind that fascism and communism were the global threats to human freedom, and he was willing to dedicate the majority of his life combating what he saw as these two huge threats to human freedom," Astro Teller said.

"It was his belief -- and here is the point on which the tension arises -- that there was no negotiating with tyrannical communism or fascism. He didn't believe that the answer was to kill them, but he believed extremely strongly that the ability to win a war, should it occur, is the only thing that would prevent a war."

Teller, who arrived in the United States in 1934, played a crucial role in the development of this country's nuclear arsenal and the Cold War strategy of deterring the Soviet Union with technological superiority. Five years after fleeing Germany for the United States, Teller became one of two scientists who persuaded Albert Einstein to sign a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning that the Germans could develop "extremely powerful bombs" using uranium. That letter led to the Manhattan Project -- a secret effort to develop an atomic bomb before the Germans did.

While working on the project, in the deserts of New Mexico, Teller began pushing for the development of a hydrogen bomb, which would rely on nuclear fusion and become a thousand times more powerful than the A-bomb. But his campaign for the H-bomb was not backed by Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant director of the Manhattan Project, nor was it supported by many other physicists who were horrified by the dropping of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasakai at the end of World War II, forcing a Japanese surrender.

Stephan Savoia/Associated Press
Edward Teller famed nuclear physicist is seen, in this 1990 file photo, gesturing above a glass paper-weight during an interview at Boston's Bunker Hill College.

But Teller persuaded President Harry S. Truman to continue work on the controversial project in 1949, primarily because the Soviets had tested their first A-bomb.

The tension between Teller and Oppenheimer ripped wide open in 1954, when Teller went before the Atomic Energy Commission to talk about the left-leaning Oppenheimer's security status. In perhaps the most searing moment of Teller's life, he defended Oppenheimer as a patriot but said, "I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more."

The testimony cost Teller many friendships and colleagues.

"It haunted him the second half of his life," Astro Teller said. "It was, I think, the most devastating thing that happened to him, being ostracized by much of the physics community."

But Astro Teller defends his grandfather's stance that day, saying: "If you actually read his testimony, it was very carefully and thoughtfully worded, essentially saying, 'Oppenheimer is a very complicated person; he has done things that I don't understand. I trust him as a human being, but in that very limited sense in which I don't understand him it would be fair to say I would rather see the vital interests of the United States in the hands of people who I understood better.' "

Scientific colleagues, Astro Teller said, turned their backs on Teller in part because of Oppenheimer's popularity. But, "I think part of it was they were really angry at Edward for choosing the policy makers over the physicists."

This personal exile lasted until the end of Teller's life.

But he rarely talked to his family about the events recounted in countless books, magazines and newspaper articles. Instead, he was more interested in tossing around theoretical problems and solving them at the dinner table.

"Figuring out stuff is what we did together," Astro Teller said.

"Sometimes he would say, 'I have an idea for a huge interstellar telescope. We can use the gravitational curvature of space created by the sun' " and create something that would "allow us to see really distant galaxies in a really interesting way. We would talk about that for an hour. Is it possible? What would it cost to get something like that done? What would the scientific benefits be, and do those justify the costs?"

Teller, according to his grandson, always had a slew of new ideas to try out. After 9/11, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, Teller wrestled with the problem of getting informants to cooperate with the United States without endangering their lives. He and a colleague came up with a solution: Drop a single-use, one-number satellite phone on the ground, with instructions explaining how to pass along the information and to collect the money without exposing the informant's identity. Astro Teller was one of many people he approached about the idea before sending it off to Congress.

Late in his life, Astro Teller said, his grandfather gave a lot of thought to the problems of the Middle East -- which he thought in the future might be destabilized as much by water supply as by oil -- and the sufferings of Third World counties. One of his last projects, which Astro Teller found after his grandfather's death, was a proposal for a self-contained reactor that would be buried underground, allowing it to lie fallow after 30 years of energy use. It was a small reactor that "might not be practical for New York, but it might make an awful lot of sense in Botswana," Teller said.

His grandfather wondered what might have happened if the United States had not dropped the bombs on Japan, but he also wrote in his memoirs that he did not regret having worked on the atomic and hydrogen bombs, saying: "I deeply regret the deaths and the injuries that resulted from the atomic bombings, but my best explanation of why I do not regret working on weapons is a question: What if we hadn't? Those who question the morality of working in wartime Los Alamos seem to have forgotten that the Soviet Union of the 1940s was controlled by Stalin."

The work on the bomb, Astro Teller said, was a responsibility his grandfather shouldered reluctantly. As an example, he told a story about his grandfather's typical response to a vexing question about the key to a happy life:

"Do what you love."

"I said to him on more than one of those occasions when he said that to me, 'Did you do what you loved?' His response was, 'I am very proud of the things that I stood for and worked on, but I wish I could have just been a physicist.'

"I don't know a clearer way of saying to people that this was no war hawk."