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Nuclear Weapons of the Atomic AgeHarvard in three years, then earned his PhD at the University of G%u00f6ttingen in Germany. He was a professor of theoretical physics at the University of California when he was tapped to head the Los Alamos Laboratory. While Oppenheimer had never directed a large project before, he had an excellent grasp of the practical aspects of designing and constructing an atomic bomb. It involved not only physics, but also chemistry, metallurgy, ordnance, and engineering. In addition, he had the ability to manage all the disparate personalities, as well as the drive to push the project to a successful conclusion. He is routinely credited as being the \bomb.\over, he became a national spokesman for science, and was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Sadly, he was later the victim of a destructive witch hunt. As a result, he was denied his security clearance, and deprived of his political and scientific influence. All this because he had shown an interest in Communism back in the 1920s. Chief among his detractors was Edward Teller.Teller, who was born in Hungary in 1908, graduated from the University of Karlsruhe. He then attended the University of Munich, and earned his PhD at the University of Leipzig. In the 1930s he emigrated to the United States, and in 1942 he was one of the first scientists to join the Manhattan Project. As a member of the Theoretical Division, he was irked at not being appointed its head. Quickly, he grew bored with the atomic-bomb project, and wanted to work on the Super. It caused a clash with Oppenheimer because the Super was of low priority during the war.Teller left Los Alamos in 1946. Then he returned in 1950, when he and Stanislaw Ulam developed a more practical design for the Super, and Teller became known as the \bomb.\attacked for the political beliefs of his youth, Teller testified against him in a security hearing. This betrayal made him an outcast in the physics community. So much so, that a former friend refused even to shake his hand.Of course, the United States relied on many other scientists in developing nuclear bombs. They had diverse backgrounds, personalities, goals, nationalities, and contributions. They included Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi, who had designed and built the first nuclear reactor in Chicago, and Ernest Lawrence who led the development of electromagnetic processing to separate uranium235 from ore. Other notable researchers included Otto Frisch, Niels Bohr, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, and John von Neumann. But the person whose E=mc%u00b2 equation was the basis for all their work%u2014Albert Einstein%u2014was not involved in the bomb project.In the Soviet Union, Igor Kurchatov was a nuclear physicist who, in 1932, received funding to establish a nuclear-science research team. This group built the USSR%u2019s first cyclotron particle accelerator in 1939. Beginning in 1940, Kurchatov worked on his country's nuclear-weapons program, and in 1943 he became director of the Soviet atomic-bomb project. Ordered by Stalin to produce a bomb by 1948, the overall project was put under the direction of a ruthless single-minded administrator, Lavrenty Beria. Their efforts led to the Soviet Union testing a nuclear weapon, First Lightning, By the time Edward Teller appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1957, he had been shunned by most of his colleagues because of his betrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer.