Carl Sagan and Edward Teller: An Uneasy Alliance over Defending the Earth

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CARL SAGAN AND EDWARD TELLER WERE bitter opponents in national security debates about issues such as "Star Wars" and nuclear test bans, but ironically they agreed on defending the Earth against asteroids--an agreement that neither, however, was ready to admit in public. They drew very different conclusions from the impact threat--Sagan saw it is a justification for space exploration, Teller as a reason to build bigger nuclear bombs.

As a consequence of the astounding success of the Cosmos television series, as well as his bestselling books and cover stories in Newsweek and Time, Sagan achieved a celebrity in the 1980s enjoyed by few academics. His fame provided a platform for public opposition to President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDD or "Star Wars," and he rallied objections from the academic community that questioned both the technical basis for SDI and its potential destabilizing effect on the balance of nuclear deterrence. In 1982, an additional opportunity presented itself to campaign for nuclear disarmament, thanks to research involving two of his …