“It was the slogan of the Civil Defense movies in the fifties,” Max said. “Térèz and I were furious when we saw them. They had a turtle who laughed and was very jolly, telling children if they crawled under their desks, they would be as safe from fire falling from the sky as a turtle in his shell. Meaning, not safe at all.”
I shook my head, baffled. “I know about the movies, although they’d stopped using them by the time I was in school. What I don’t understand is why Judy thought she was being punished for saying it.”
“That isn’t what Judy said,” Lotty said. “She was laughing because ‘duck and cover’ had worked for her, despite someone—probably Kitty—telling her it was nonsense. Kitty would have ordered Judy not to repeat any of her views on American defense policy at school. You didn’t spend time in Nazi Austria without learning to keep very quiet if you opposed government policies. Not to mention the intense anti-Communist hysteria here during the fifties. If you opposed nuclear weapons you were labeled a Red or Red sympathizer.”
I pictured Judy as a little girl, her mother warning her not to repeat any of the family’s subversive opinions in public, warning her so sternly that in her adult, drug-eaten brain, she thought some terrible punishment was meted out for trumpeting “duck and cover” as a survival strategy.
“It’s as good an explanation as any,” I said. “It’s just—I don’t know—her reaction made me expect something deeper. Maybe it’s because of Homeland Security being on my tail, or Metargon thinking that Martin has absconded with their version of the Stuxnet virus. Is this story about family secrets or nuclear secrets?”
“It could be both,” Max said. “His great-grandmother died when Benjamin Dzornen could have saved her. Edward Breen brought Martina’s Nazi student to the States to do rocket and weapons work. Those connect Martin’s family to nuclear secrets.”
I took a handful of silverware from Lotty to dry. “I feel like I’m in the middle of that old Dylan song: Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Warshawski-Jones?”
To the Editor
Physics Today
July 1985
Not since the days of “Duck and Cover” have we seen so much time, money and energy spent on something as futile as President Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan. The Great Communicator knows that money talks: 500 million in immediate cash has gone to the top ten defense contractors to spread across the United States. This doesn’t include some hundred billion in multi-year appropriations for space lasers, secure ground communications, and many other expensive fantasies. I was glad to see Edward Breen’s Metargon company in the top ten: Mr. Breen and I are old collaborators, and I know he will do whatever it takes to make his contractual obligations come true.
Despite the beautiful graphics in your June issue, this initiative is more an exercise in expensive science fiction than in achievable physics and engineering. So far, the only tests of laser weapons in destroying incoming targets have worked within a margin of error for stochastic excursions only, but notwithstanding this, appropriations are happily escalating.
The program is destabilizing, both for our delicate relations with our European allies and with the Soviet Union, thus leading us closer to the preemptive first strikes so dear to defense hawks.
It has only been a short two years since we got to see a leaked Pentagon report, claiming that the U.S. could survive a “protracted,” i.e., five-year-long, nuclear war. Defense Secretary Weinberger’s undersecretary for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces has said that if the United States had a good civil defense policy, we’d be back to normal within five years of total nuclear war.
Last year on the anniversary of Hiroshima, the United States Energy Secretary went to the Nevada Proving Grounds where he witnessed his first thermonuclear test. He said it was “exciting,” and that he remained committed to a winnable nuclear war.
I had the dubious privilege of spending time at the nuclear weapons proving grounds in Nevada. The ground water there is still undrinkable, the cattle who stray onto the land to graze suffer terrible deformities, and towns a hundred miles away suffer from rare cancers even to this day.
Star Wars apologists have no idea what would happen if we started detonating our weapons on human populations, but the Roman historian Tacitus must surely have seen their vision when he wrote, “They ravage, they slaughter, and call it ‘empire.’ They create a desert and call it ‘peace.’”
Sincerely
Gertrud Memler, Ph.D., Physics, University of Vienna
July 2, 1985
To: All Field Agents
From: Barney Montoya, Senior Agent in Charge
Locate Gertrud Memler. This search has highest priority. She is an embarrassment to the President of the United States and it is a black mark on our Bureau that we have failed to find her during the last twenty-five years.
Our file on her shows she was a Nazi sympathizer or supporter brought into the U.S. in 1946 to help build weapons & rockets, vanished from Nevada 1955. She has a deep cover, surfaces briefly with letters or articles on weapons, but always uses false return addresses.