One of his main goals in teaching Nuclear Fictions is to help undergraduates become better thinkers and better readers. "I don't want students to walk out as carbon copies of my opinions," he said, "and I don't care if they have no clue of what I think a book [we are studying] means. I am far happier if I succeed in complicating their easy responses and moralistic views. This I do, or try to do, in the belief that they'll be better readers–and thinkers–the more able they are imaginatively to absorb the validity of points of view they do not share."

Traister often reads long excerpts to the class from related but unassigned books. On the whole, he'd recommend about a dozen per three-hour session, complete with title, author and biographical squib, publication date and subsequent editions, an account of political repercussions following the book's release and a critical review.

"He strikes me as a weird, highly intelligent man," one of his students offered. A senior in the class called him "the most erudite man I have ever met." A Penn English instructor quipped, "He's one of the few people around here who's probably as smart as he thinks he is."

Traister's devotion to books is in part an appreciation for the value of reading and ideas, but it's also a covetous affection for the objects themselves. He lives in a Philadelphia suburb with his wife, Barbara Howard Traister '65, four cats and a three-legged pit bull puppy named Bruno, rescued from a New York animal shelter's death row. Their home is submerged beneath an incoming tide of books, despite use of an annex as the main library. "We've got art in our closets that we can't put up," laments Barbara Traister, an English professor and department chair at Lehigh University.

"I wouldn't mind living forever," Traister brooded over his piles of books. "I'm curious about so much that forever wouldn't be long enough." He's looking down the barrel again, reflecting on his death-haunted life. "The world is filled with ways that encourage you to leave it–sometimes in an unwanted hurry. I do what I can, fairly confident that an exception is not going to be made in my case."

***

Bringing forth Little Boy let loose the nightmare shadow that Traister sensed stalking the Bronx of his youth. The Cold War that followed Hiroshima's destruction was a caricature of peace, paid for by commanders and crews in bombers, missile silos, submarines and command-and-control bunkers who were trained and poised at every moment to hurl a thousand suns.

Traister believes undergraduates are not old enough to feel the weight of this history, and he teaches in part to place something of that burden upon them. "To be honest," remarked a sophomore history major enrolled in Nuclear Fictions, "I never really understood what the big deal about the Cold War was and why everybody was so happy when the Berlin Wall came down. It just seemed like a big rock-and-roll event."

"All of this is ancient history to them," said Traister. The Cold War held in check the instruments of destruction wielded by the superpowers. That "balance" was lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. "I'd like students who take my course to be a smidgeon more thoughtful about these kinds of issues because they remain with us [in the form of nuclear terrorism]. There are just so many pressure points in the world, and the technology is too widespread–the secrets simply aren't secret, and fissile material has seeped out of the old Soviet Union. Somewhere, sometime, some schmuck is going to use it again."