including governments, so afraid of the consequences of nuclear warfare that they would not dare engage in this sort of altercation. He continued in his junior position at Los Alamos until 1953, when he took a temporary leave of absence to obtain his PhD from Cornell. Finishing his PhD in 1954, he returned to Los Alamos, and by 1956 he was famous for his work in small-bomb development. Freeman Dyson is quoted as saying, "A great part of the small-bomb development of the last five years [at Los Alamos] was directly due to Ted." Although the majority of the brilliant minds at Los Alamos were focused on developing the fusion bomb, Taylor remained hard at work on improving fission bombs. His innovations in this area of study were so important that he was eventually given the freedom to choose whatever he wanted to study. Eventually, Taylor's stance on nuclear warfare and weapon development changed, altering his career path. In 1956, Taylor left his position at Los Alamos and went to work for General Atomics. Here, he developed TRIGA, a reactor that produced isotopes used in the medical field. In 1958, Taylor began working on Project Orion, which sought to develop space travel that relied on nuclear energy as the fuel source. The proposed spacecraft would use a series of nuclear fission reactions as its propellant, thus accelerating space travel while eliminating the Earth's source of fuel for nuclear weaponry. In collaboration with Dyson, Taylor led the project development team for six years until the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was instituted. After this, they could not test their developments and the project became inviable. Late career Theodore Taylor's career shifted again after project Orion. He developed an even greater fear of the potential ramifications of his entire life's work, and began taking precautionary measures to mitigate those concerns. In 1964 he served as the deputy director of the Defense Atomic Support Agency (a branch within the Department of Defense), where he managed the U.S. nuclear weapons inventory. Then, in 1966 he created a consulting firm called the International Research and Technology Corporation, located in Vienna, Austria, which sought to prevent the development of more nuclear weapons programs. Taylor also worked as a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Princeton University. His focus eventually turned to renewable energy, and In 1980 Taylor started a company called Nova