You would not have had the Berlin wall fall without Teller. There is much, no doubt, that cannot be told.
I sympathize with pacificism, and so did Teller. From the start Teller believed in world government and said so publicly. He believed it was the only way to avoid terminal bloody conflict. He was with the Chicago group of scientists whose principles were embraced by the 1500 or so who eventually broke with Teller. Where Teller saw their methods would not work was where the Soviets and others may "defect" from unuilateral pacificism. And defect they certainly did. No one knew more than he of the brutal repressive tactics of the socialist hordes in his native Hungary. Did the Eastern European countries ask for or deserve the domination of the Red Machine? They got it anyway, and at an enormous cost to their people. This lesson must be driven home to those who thought the status quo of the western powers at the end of WWII was something they must accept, and where people were treated well enough for all to tolerate.
It is fine to not want war. It is the better, more natural way to incline. However if you turn away from conflict it does in no way guarantee, as we know from Chamberlain, that your enemy will concur and turn as you do. Ho Chi Min attacked the south, they did not attack him. The expansion of the Soviet empire was real, they did try to topple governments to ones aligned with their outlook. Many. Their avowed intention was to kill off the western representative government as basically corrupt and evil and replace it with their own totalitarian brand of government.
The philosophical paradox is that no government can pretend to achieve its oft stated lofty idealism. No coalition of governments will guarantee freedom and self determination for the citizen as its most sacred and inviolable principle in unremitting practice as well as maxim. In practice, all governments are smothering, demanding, taxing, and monolithically coercive. Only such as the economic integrity, homogeneity of the population and the religion and other cultural commonality can achieve stability, is a government allowed to function and draw on the loyalty of its citizenry and their efforts to pledge their services and their wealth for its defense, growth and power.
No more stirring sentiments of freedom and individual rights are enshrined anywhere in any constitution than in the Soviet declaration of the rights of its citizens. The practice it seems, fell far short of the promise most often.
In order to achieve a military implacability in the face of endless Soviet Expansion, a Fabian laissez-faire foreign policy, Teller knew could not be practiced with impunity. As the Welsh know, if you do not match the military might continually throughout your realm and your areas of influence of your hereditary enemies they will eventually overwhelm you. As Teller knew, he could not embrace the realities of facing up to a giant war machine and relentless proselytization of the Book of Communism without breaking with the do-nothing-and-they-will-go-away crowd completely.
For all the military power that was built over the years, and no greater army has ever been assembled than the Soviet machine, there was remarkably little war waged. It was long period marked by forays and skirmishes here and there, which while they did have their toll, fell comfortably short of the promise of the terrible war that would end the reign of humankind. This was Teller's legacy and we can only vainly speculate what legacy there may have been achieved of a policy of a militarily weakened, cringing appeasement. It certainly did not do a hell of a lot of good with the likes of Adolph Hitler.
Having vented all this poly-talk, are you sure the resident eminence-grise of this thread has a mittzen-offen policy towards poly-math-psycho babble that leads away from economic and resource extraction issues on the weekend? I thot there was some tolerance of these thread forays when the week relaxed, but I detect a distinct frictional component to pet peeves historical here on occasion. Is there a way that we can weave into these arguments a non gratuitous connection to gold, markets and mining companies? I can see a niche for probability and mathematical prediction as it relates to wave functions that model market flux, and I can see where world politics relates to the price of gold and money markets and mining policy, but general discussions of war and peace relate to mining in only a most peripheral way. I find it difficult to segue from Dr. Teller to Dr. Goldfinger. Perhaps you can suggest something.
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