Edward Teller
Edward Teller (1908-2003) was a theoretical physicist who was born in Austria-Hungary, educated in Germany, and who immigrated to the United States in 1935 to escape Hitler.
His specialty was nuclear energy, both fission and fusion. He discovered the Jahn-Teller Effect in 1939), describing the geometrical distortion of electron clouds undergo in chemical reactions of metals he also helped develop the the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) isotherm for surface physics and chemistry.
In 1942, Teller worked with Leo Szilard at the University of Chicago in the early stages of the Manhattan Project, and a year later headed the Theoretical Physics division at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
When the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in August 1949 based on secrets stolen from the United States, Teller began advocating construction of a far more powerful hydrogen bomb. He derived how to accomplish this with mathematician Stanislaw Ulam.
Teller was widely hated by liberals [1] for testifying against J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1954 in hearings that resulted in the United States Atomic Energy Commission taking away Oppenheimer's security clearance. Teller testified, "I feel I would prefer to see the vital interests of this country in hands that I understand better and therefore trust more."
One of the few conservative academic physicists, Teller later supported President Ronald Reagan's missile defense proposal known as Star Wars.