Edward Teller interview

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KUCI’s Doug Bradley interviews Edward Teller who is known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”, although he claimed he did not care for the title. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy, and surface physics. Teller was also one of the first prominent people to raise the danger of climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels. At an address to the membership of the American Chemical Society in December 1957, Teller warned that the large amount of carbon-based fuel that had been burnt since the mid-19th century was increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would “act in the same way as a greenhouse and will raise the temperature at the surface”, and that he had calculated that if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by 10% “an appreciable part of the polar ice might melt.”