The scientists, engineers, technicians and bureaucrats–the brains behind the Manhattan Project–were the products of books. The main players who conceived and built the first atomic bomb were trained or held appointments at some of the nation's leading research universities. Stories of how these people acted and the way events unfolded were examined at the University of Pennsylvania last spring by a dozen undergraduates in an honors seminar called Nuclear Fictions. The course took a literary approach to the subject matter, using a range of genres–memoir, biography, essay, novel, poetry, play, government document, film and comic book–to probe how understanding gets "constructed" and history gets "represented and re-presented."

All this reading makes for a remarkably comprehensive survey, but for Professor Daniel Traister '63 the course stems from more than mere intellectual interest. "It arises out of something personal," he said.

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Traister is curator of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Penn. When he's not fielding reference questions on antiquarian materials or acquiring them, he's busy, as the English-language literature bibliographer, beefing up the general collection with new and old publications. With a doctorate in Renaissance English literature, he has written articles in scholarly and professional publications on literature, bibliography, history, rare book librarianship and library collection development.

Besides holding a job in Penn's library, Traister teaches courses almost every semester on traditional academic topics that have included everything from Shakespeare to westerns to a literary look at combat in modern war. Nuclear Fictions plumbs a subject near, if not dear, to Traister's heart.

"There are good reasons not to take this course," he counseled those who showed up for the opening session, darkening first-day twitters by laying out the effects of a thermonuclear blast in New York City, about 100 miles away. "They have a fairly amusing destructive radius," he noted without smiling. Into the ensuing silence, he injected the prediction that "this generation of students" would likely experience the use of these weapons–"at a distance, if you're lucky; close by, if you're not." During a break, one student conversed with another about a choice he needed to make between Nuclear Fictions and a course on the Spanish Inquisition. He didn't return.

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Young Danny Traister was the kind of kid who, as a third grader, discussed the foreign policy of Eisenhower and Dulles with his friends on the way to play stickball in their Bronx neighborhood. His mother was a "non-serious but card-carrying Communist," and his father believed "all Communists were horses' asses of one vintage or another." Together they created a "clichéd Jewish middle-class New York household," and their "mixed marriage" often convulsed it with the passions of political argument. And in those years, there was politics aplenty.

A child veteran of the Cold War and keenly attuned to its normalized lunacy, Traister grew up in an apartment complex with an anti-aircraft battery positioned along the Jerome Park Reservoir, just across the street from his building. In his dreams, chunky-looking Buck Rogers missiles descended in slow motion through ineffectual cannon fire. From his apartment's north-facing windows, he watched them coming down over Van Cortland Park from a transpolar trajectory. "I couldn't tell you how those dreams ended," he said recently. "I don't remember them ending, but you didn't have to be very bright to dope out that the chance of at least one bomb getting through to take you out was reasonably high." In his child's mind, the missiles were aimed not only at New York City but directly at him. "They didn't even need to have very good aim," he added. "We grew up knowing this."

In P.S. 95, around the outbreak of the Korean Conflict, school authorities distributed dog tags to the pupils. The principal had one of the older children, a survivor of Allied bombing raids on Germany, testify to the virtues of wearing the peculiar adornment. The tags, the boy told them, would help parents identify their smashed corpses amid the smoking city ruins. He had seen this done. "It scared the living pee out of me," Traister exclaimed. "Psychologically, I think this was an extremely witty thing to do with second graders. . . . It's the sort of thing you retain over the years."

The Doomsday Clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was the chronometer by which he told the time. Not long after the first hydrogen bomb was tested, the year he turned 11, the publication's timekeepers advanced the hands to two minutes before midnight. Traister remembers: "You were conscious of that clock because in New York you knew you were living in a bull's-eye."

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