gennady gorelik

There are two aged controversies, «Teller vs. Oppenheimer» and «Teller vs. Ulam» that made a father of the American hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, persona non grata in the US physics community. Teller was blamed for trying - on selfish grounds - to destroy Robert Oppenheimer and to diminish the contribution of Stanislaw Ulam to the making of the H-bomb. Andrei Sakharov surprised many readers of his «Memoirs» by claiming that American physicists were unfair in their attitude toward Teller. New historical evidence from Russian sources, both archival and oral, presented in this article, suggests that we should reexamine those conflicts and that Sakharov’s opinion of Teller was probably more justified than the denigration of his person by most American physicists.