Emily Strasser Speaks the Unspeakable
Emily Strasser, Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History. Published by the University Press of Kentucky, April 2023. © The University Press of Kentucky.
Half-Life of a Secret by Emily Strasser is easily among my favorite reads of the year. I devoured this story about the author’s grandfather who was a chemical engineer in Oak Ridge—one of three secret cities where the express development of the first atomic bomb falling onto Hiroshima took place. In her incredibly well researched book, Strasser tries to make sense of Oak Ridge's complicated past, as it transformed a place of nature and stability into a source of man-made, unstable destruction.
“In the official Seal of the City of Oak Ridge, a variation of the stylized atom, an acorn serves as the nucleus … An acorn suggests roots, organic growth, respect for land and history. But in a nuclear bomb, it is the nucleus that splits, the fracturing of that heavy center that blazes into the God-defying energy that melts deserts and disappears cities.”
This book spoke to me from page one. As a child, I harbored an enormous fear of all technology related to radiation, be it nuclear reactors or the atomic bomb. I spent days marking test sites on my wobbly globe. During regular siren checks in our town, I went into full-blown panic mode. It seems that I am not alone in this fear, because in Oak Ridge kids were tight with anxiety from shift change whistles that they mistook as air-raid sirens.
I enjoyed this story for its mix of memoir and historical writing. Strasser conveys some of her most personal thoughts as a stream of inner consciousness, which is very befitting of this serious topic that is often only talked about in hushed tones.
This theme of an elusive past is introduced when the author recalls a fear-inducing portrait of grandfather George Strasser, in which he stands, unmoved, in front of a yellow-orange blazing mushroom cloud—a photograph that she can't seem to locate anywhere as an adult, for the sake of this book and for the sake of believing in her own recollections. Is this elusive memory just another instance of things seen but not spoken about?
It is pleasant to get to know the author in this way and learn how she grappled with the complicated history of her family, while uncovering the details of our country’s nuclear history. Part of the magic of this book is that it is so well researched because the author is personally invested. Nonfiction is interspersed with great creative writing, which is not routinely found in history texts.
What I connected with the most was the immense element of shame the book discusses. There is a shared “guilt” that both the author and I feel when it comes to the havoc wreaked by the Second World War. In her writing, Strasser comes to terms with the scary legacy she inherited from her grandfather, a political and environmental devastation related to the wartime actions of the United States.
My own shame originates at the other end of this political spectrum. I grew up in Austria, which at the time was Germany. Similar to Strasser’s, my shame is related to the widespread destruction that this war and the Holocaust caused. What Strasser describes is eerily similar to the generational trauma in my own story and that of the people of my country. Strasser quotes a trauma expert in her book, who points out that not only victims but also perpetrators experience “the psychic deformations of violent histories.”
“Germans after World War II, Schwab suggests, may have corrupted their unprocessed grief over their own war dead, their complicity in the mass murder of the Jewish people, their adulation of Hitler, and their own humanity. We might call the nuclear bomb one of the United States’ many collective phantoms.”
She concludes from this argument that the bomb may have been a result of the many unresolved phantoms of our nation—founded on atrocities, genocide, stolen land, and slavery.
In a way, Strasser's thoughts and citations remind me of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, recently made into a cathartic movie. Both relate the atrocious eugenics of the Second World War to that of slavery and the Jim Crow era, thereby also linking the many mass injustices and genocides of the world to a common eugenicist denominator.
“It is no accident that in the wake of the bombings …, many Black American intellectuals, activists, artists, and religious leaders … understood the threat of nuclear weapons as inextricably intertwined with the global fight against racism and colonialism.”
In this realm, Strasser also spends a good portion of her text discussing the fates and roles of marginalized communities. For one, the discrimination against Black workers in Oak Ridge led to their segregation in deliberate and separate slums. Not only that, these workers were also subjected to medical tests that involved the injection of radioactive materials—not at all unlike the awful experiments inflicted on prisoners in Nazi camps.
“There was even a yearning in the worst of these narratives—that nuclear war might wipe out racially diverse cities, cleanse the country of the blight of urban decay, and return the nation to the independent spirit of the idealized pioneers.”
Returning to the topic of nuclear warfare but keeping in line with these injustices, Strasser then turns towards radiation and its public health implications.
Calutron operators at their panels, in the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, TN during World War II. The calutrons were used to refine uranium ore into fissile material. During the Manhattan Project effort to construct an atomic explosive, workers toiled in secrecy, most having no idea to what end their labors were directed. Gladys Owens, the woman seated in the foreground, didn't understand the exact purpose of her job until seeing this photo in a public tour of the facility fifty years later. Ed Westcott / American Museum of Science and Energy / Manhattan Engineering District. Circa 1943-45.
It is simply shocking to read about the ignorant pop culture and bomb-related tourism sprouting in the 1950s around Los Alamos, Oak Ridge's sister city, that stands in such stark contrast with what we know about nuclear radiation today. Las Vegas showgirls seem to have worn mushroom cloud headdresses, and beauty queens paraded for the honor of being named “Miss Atomic Bomb,” drawing the attention of visitors who paused on their way to view tests.
Strasser’s tour of the area in the present day is grimmer, highlighting the horrible consequences of these manifold tests, even though one of the bus drivers of her tour tries to assuage her by pointing out that 98 percent of the site can be walked without danger, then adding that pregnant women, somewhat dubiously, are discouraged from attending the tour due to “the long bus ride and uneven terrain.”
Back in Tennessee, it is Oak Ridge’s buried radioactive waste that poses a grave danger to the environment. The half-lives of its components can range from mere seconds to billions of years, and the time span during which radioactive waste is considered to be hazardous lasts around ten of such half-lives. This raises a concerning question: how long does it have to stay buried before it won't cause damage any longer? How many humanities do billions of years encompass?
The lesser known heavy metal damage that Oak Ridge and its sister cities have caused is also discussed. As early as 1955, scientists had measured elevated levels of mercury, and these measurements became classified information, unknown to most people even within the Oak Ridge National Security complex.
“I soon learned what others had learned … —that to tug at one thread, one silver thread of mercury, is to unearth a whole tangled mess left behind by half a century of a rushed and secretive arms race with little regard to the long-term consequences on human health and the environment.”
In 1977, an investigation found that more than half a million pounds of mercury had been spilled or lost, with another two million unaccounted for. The public was not notified. These dregs are the result of Hiroshima, of Nagasaki, of more than seventy thousand nuclear bombs built by the US since 1945, and of more than five thousand warheads still resting in silos today, “lined up in underground bunkers like boxes of monochromatic crayons, the dumb toys of this deadliest game.”
And then, just when I thought that this book had delivered everything I could have hoped for, it surprised me with a pivot that turned out to be yet another parallel to my life—a visit to Hiroshima. As Strasser writes about her trip, I traveled with her in time, as I remembered my own journey to this city of all-pervasive “peace” at a very similar age.
“This park, this city - they were supposed to be about peace. … There was the Peace Foundation and the Peace Pond and the Children’s Peace Monument, and I began to feel the way I do if I say a word over and over and over again until it becomes unstuck from its meaning, a strange sound lost to the cicadas’ buzzing.”
Just like for Strasser, the message of peace that's presented so ubiquitously was quite overwhelming for me. At the time, I was mesmerized by it. I also remember admiring the resilience of Hiroshimans. So does Strasser, as she talks to a number of bomb survivors—the “hibakushas”. In doing so, she realizes that one subconscious goal of her trip may have been to lessen her own guilt: “I wanted the hibakushas’ forgiveness, even though I believed I had no right to it.” By seeing how Hiroshima had recovered, she was able to convince herself that the destruction her grandfather helped bring about was not total.
Putting the two opposing countries side by side after her visit, she makes a perceptive connection between the post-war messages of peace each delivers.
“In Los Alamos and in Oak Ridge, the story of the bomb is told without Hiroshima, and here [in Hiroshima], the story is told without the war. There is no conjunction between these histories. No cause. No guilt. No blame.”
Interesting to me are also the parallels that she draws to the horrifying Nanjing massacre during the city's occupation in the winter of 1937-38. Japanese soldiers slaughtered, raped, and sexually enslaved hundreds of thousands of women and girls from occupied territories.
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, at Naka-ku, Hiroshima, in Japan, design by Kenzō Tange in 1955. Photo retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
I, myself, went to both memorials over the course of a month or so and was deeply affected by the difference in their portrayals. The museum in Hiroshima communicated a message of peace with the American perpetrators of the atomic bomb, almost too overwhelming to be true, while the Nanjing museum made sure to focus on the horrific violence committed by the Japanese massacres in much graphic detail, going as far as having visitors walk over an open grave of human remains. I think a message somewhere in the middle might have been what I’d have expected. As it turns out though, there seems to be a bigger behemoth hiding behind these two portrayals according to Strasser’s analysis.
With the bombing removed from the context of World War II, both American culpability and the atrocities committed by the Japanese are erased, even though the total death toll in the Asia-Pacific War ranges in the tens of millions, mostly composed of noncombatants and victims of Japan’s imperialist aggressions.
Looking back, Japanese war crimes were seemingly not as vehemently condemned as those of the Germans according to the author. Instead, a symbolism of peace was installed, which benefited both Japan and America.
“Enshrining Hiroshima as a universal symbol of peace outside of historical specificity served the interests of both American and Japanese leaders who wished not to be held to account. To American military leaders, linking the bomb to global peace upheld the narrative of the bomb’s necessity by implying that the bomb had, in ending the war, brought peace; at the same time, it justified the continued production of nuclear weapons on the perverse logic that deterrence preserved peace.”
The grand finale of the book culminates in posing a geopolitical, almost philosophical, question about the aftermath of this large war that befell our world. Strasser wonders if the publicly instilled message of supposed peace was really all about soothing our consciences, about writing a history in which nobody was held responsible.
This book made me think long after reaching its end. My ruminations led me back to my own long-fought internal question: Will humanity ever learn from these massive mistakes, or will we repeat these tragedies over and over?
In the 90s, when I asked my own grandfather about his very brief stint in 1945 as a sixteen-year-old German soldier and about the atrocities that happened in the Holocaust, he only said, “Look at the TV—the same thing is happening in Bosnia right now.” At the time I was so disappointed—was he deflecting?
I was too young to realize, but I think this moment in time was one of the many small instances in which I picked up the shame he and his generation deferred onto me. The secretive shame that my grandfather never talked about is now up to me to express. It seems that historically it is my role to do just that—my role in that supposed peace in between one war and the next.
What is the half-life of such a secret?
Once the half-life of the world’s shame has elapsed, it is our role to speak. And this book makes me realize—despite the apprehension I felt—that I'm not at all alone. The author wrote very similar words: “Some deep part of me, sealed up, stale, and scared, was breathing. So we could say the true things after all. So we could survive the telling.”
Strasser and I both carry this generational shame with us and attempt to process it—in the form of reading one book after another about the Holocaust for me, and for Strasser by researching the atomic bomb in meticulous detail. In doing so, we try to make it right, to understand, to save the world from another such thing—and yet we can't.
This was an unforgettable book that will stay with me. It reels you in by starting out with a well-defined slice of history, only to end in a much bigger feat—questioning the everlasting cycle of tragedy that we cannot seem to escape from.
The beginning of each of these historical cycles of destruction is also the end of another, and the end a beginning, each a half-life of shame and progress apart. As such, a new beginning contains everything we need to know to avoid our end. There's hope, so much hope, in this recurring opportunity to shift our story—but will we ever grab it by its horns and seek out peace, real peace for once, once and for all?
Thank you Emily Strasser for this extraordinary publication. It left me in awe.
You Might Also Like:
Baseball, Melodrama, and Public Perception: An Interview with Travis Stern
