The Chicago Public Library had a copy of The Secret Diary at their main branch. I was meeting Max and Lotty for dinner at the Pottawattamie Club downtown—Lotty had asked Max to see if any of his old refugee networks had any information on Martina Saginor—so it was easy to stop at the library on my way.
Since I found myself at the club before Max and Lotty, I sat in the reception area, thumbing through the book, looking for what had interested Martin in it. The Secret Diary wasn’t as much a biography of Arnold Zachny as a history of the View against the background of the Cold War. Zachny had been an early supporter of disarmament; he published a collection of letters from Japanese women on the damage that radioactive fallout had done to their husbands and sons caught in the Pacific when the U.S. exploded hydrogen bombs in the Marshall Islands.
As I flipped through the pages, a familiar name jumped out at me.
One of the most curious incidents in the history of the View was its publication of a letter from a woman named Gertrud Memler. Memler had been a high-ranking Nazi engineer brought to the United States in the great Russian-American talent grab at the end of the Second World War. She was a controversial figure: she was the highest-ranking woman employed by the Germans in their nuclear weapons work. In fact, although hard evidence is difficult to find, as a member of the Uranverein (Uranium Club), she was probably in charge of the reactor program near Innsbruck.
When Memler came to the States after the war, she was assigned to projects at the Nevada Proving Grounds under the aegis of the Nobel Laureate Benjamin Dzornen. She disappeared in 1953 and was never seen again. However, from time to time, she would write letters to learned journals or to newspapers. These letters were vehemently anti-nuclear in content. Her about-face, from Innsbruck overseer to anti-nuclear activist, was extraordinary.
The FBI tried unsuccessfully to trace her, since she was privy to U.S. nuclear secrets. She may have defected to the Soviet Union; one of their embassy attachés could have posted letters for her. A letter that Memler wrote to the View and the FBI’s response show their futile efforts to track her down.
May 1962
To Arnold Zachny
Editor
American View
Re: Edward Teller and The Danger of Fallout
Dr. Teller is widely known as the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.” In his recent essay in your magazine, he assures us, as a good father should, that his child poses no threat to the well-being of other children on this planet. He writes that radioactive fallout from nuclear tests is no more dangerous to our long-term health than being a few ounces overweight. The fear of radiation is irrational, Dr. Teller concludes, and has led Americans to the dangerous place of ending the thousands of tests of hydrogen and atom bombs that we have detonated on the ground, on the sea and in the air.
Like many parents whose children behave mischievously, Dr. Teller has either been too busy or too blind to see what damage his little darling is doing. Perhaps all the time he spends in Washington, fighting to continue nuclear testing, means he hasn’t had time to go to the Nevada Proving Grounds to see the impact of his child on human and animal life.
I, to my sorrow, spent some time in these proving grounds. This is what I saw: it was routine for the United States Army to expose its soldiers to bombs being detonated less than a mile away. They were given no protective gear, not even sunglasses, just told to put their hands over their ears and stand with their backs to the blast.
It was routine for the United States Navy to put pigs, sheep, and dogs, chained in cages, at Ground Zero of these tests. Animals at Ground Zero are obliterated. Those chained in cages further away come back to U.S. Navy labs with the skin ulcerated and peeling from their bodies.
The data on the health of humans, both soldiers and civilians, exposed to this much radiation is a secret jealously guarded by our government, but I saw the burns on their skin myself. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not give us enough data on the high (60 percent) probability of developing bone or blood cancers for survivors of an atomic bomb, one test at Nevada should have told us all we need to know about Dr. Teller’s baby’s tremendous destructive power.
The first time we slaughtered dogs should have been the last. They were guilty of no crime except their inexplicable love for humans, which let them follow us into cages where they were left to die in terrible fear. But we could not stop with one test, we continued to do many hundred others, with dogs, sheep, pigs, whose screams will follow me to my grave, as much as the screams of prisoners at the Uranverein weapons and reactor plant.
Civilians as far as 135 miles away have begun developing terrible cancers in numbers disproportionate to their population. We see this, but we continue to build bigger bombs, enough now to obliterate the entire human race many times over.
If I had produced a child this dangerous, I would not go around the world bragging about being its father.
Sincerely
Gertrud Memler, Ph.D., Physics
July 16, 1962
Telegram from: Cal Hooper
Special Agent in Charge
Washington