Edward Teller

My reactors professor likes to give little history lessons on the names behind theories and methods in chemical engineering - Fritz, Haber, Amundsen, Langmuir, etc. Well, the name Edward Teller popped up the other day, and from my professor's description of him as "obnoxious, but extremely productive", I knew I would enjoy reading about Teller and consider him a hero. Teller was a scientist (actually, a chemical engineer!) who fell on the right side of history by promoting a vigorous national defense against the Soviet threat, much to the resentment of his fellow left-wing scientists who believed in capitulation and appeasement (since, as they well knew, Communism was the wave of the future, so why anger the Communist gods?). Teller's scientific achievements were too numerous to count, but the biggest is probably making fusion a reality in development of the H-bomb. His final great contribution was to convince Reagan to work on SDI ("Star Wars"), which hastened the fall of the Soviet empire.

Here's a good quote from this interview:

"I am a pacifist, and you my friends are pacifists, but I am telling you, if you are not going to work on the instruments of war, freedom will be lost everywhere."

As the inimitable Glenn Reynolds would say: indeed.