Academic Istvan Hargittai said Teller, as a leading scientist,
had an outstanding role in the defense process against totalitarian
regimes.
Teller was born in Budapest on January 15, 1908. He fled to the
U.S. in 1935 from Nazi persecution, where he became a professor at
George Washington University until 1941, the same year he earned his
US citizenship. Teller then took part in defence projects, such as
the Manhattan Plan, which led to the development of the atomic bomb,
and the Strategic Defence Initiative dubbed as star wars plan.
After the Soviet Union tested its atomic bomb in 1949 he
persuaded the US administration to push ahead on H-bomb research. He
worked on the bomb through the first megaton-scale explosion in the
Pacific in 1952.
In 2003 US President George W. Bush presented Teller with the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civil award granted in
the United States. Teller died in the same year at the age of 95 at
his home on the Stanford University campus in California on
September 9.
