Alex WellersteinVerified account

Additionally: the general history with Soviet post-Cold War spy stuff was intel agencies claiming credit for nuclear work.

One would imagine that if they could claim to have gotten the USSR the H-bomb — and thus devalue Sakharov's contributions — they would have.

I once asked Edward Teller the extent to which the USSR H-bomb relied on espionage. He insisted it was all Sakharov, not spies.

Sure, but would he know that? He had a definite agenda there. Teller's argument was always that H-bombs were easy for scientists to make.

Hence, in his mind, it was criminal that Oppenheimer et al. had said they shouldn't/couldn't work on them originally.

It was people in the pro-Oppenheimer camp (like Bethe) who insisted that they were difficult, that Teller (or Ulam) was a genius, etc.

Teller's insistence surprised me. "Sakharov designed it without outside help." Period. Expected more uncertainty. Hiding something?

Again, I think it is more about Teller's own view of the history of H-bombs than anything on the inside. It was a multi-decade debate,

Thanks. Do you think that incident led Wheeler to transition away from nuclear physics toward general relativity?

It coincides very well with his general turn away from weapons work, yes. He didn't totally pull out of it. But it seems to have shaken him.