Today is the 110th birthday of Edward Teller. He's an easy Cold War villain for a lot of reasons. A bit too easily caricatured and dismissed by historians, I think, but he lent himself to that.pic.twitter.com/rt957V7Hw0
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I think Teller thought that bomb design and physics was just a matter of getting good people together and setting them free to think big ideas. It turns out its a bit more complex than that, but it's an ideology that in some ways could sound self-deprecating.
In Teller's mind, coming up with the H-bomb and everything else was just him doing kind of obvious things. The only time he got grabby about priority was when people wanted to give it to Ulam instead — he thought Ulam betrayed the work by not supporting it.