A-Bombs In the Kitchen (Emeril Says, "Bam!")

by Stephen J. Gertz

"I am become Death, the destroyer of appetites" 

(J. Robert Oppenheimer, Krishna in the Kitchen, p. 48).

Wondering what to serve for that special dinner with family and friends? Bored by Martha Stewart? Rachel Ray outré? Jacque Pépin and Julia Child too mild? Don't want to nuke in the microwave but want to dazzle with a meal that's the bomb?

Look no further than How To Make An Atomic Bomb in Your Own Kitchen, 1951's salute to nuclear physics, the Cold War, and Betty Crocker.

"Written in an interesting, lucid style, this is an essential book for the millions who want to know the basics of atomics."

It's an introduction to molecular gastronomy and culinary physics writ large and long before Ferran Adrià began serving foamed neutrinos at El Bulli or Nathan Myhrvold began publishing Modernist Cuisine.

Everything you need to know about building a nuclear bomb in the privacy of the pantry is here. All that's lacking are centrifuges, so tough to find on the open market without clearance from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or a clandestine connection in North Korea.

Here's an apocryphal recipe, contributed by an anonymous insider at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Fission Fish ala Fermi:

Holy mackerel
Sprig of rosemary
Soupçon of enriched uranium
Dash of plutonium
Split pea atoms 
Cloud of mushrooms
Salt to taste

Wearing lead apron and density 4.2 goggles, add ingredients to well-oiled saucepan. Heat to 1,000,000 Kelvins. Duck and cover for thirty minutes until vaporized. Serve shadow of fish on platter with a spray of cilantro, al fresco.

Fusion cuisine at its finest. Enjoy!

Post-priandal fallout will undoubtedly be a dense shower of post-mortem praise, with memories lasting the half-life of your average radioactive isotope.

"Dinner's ready!"

It pains me to admit that How To Make An Atomic Bomb In Your Own Kitchen is light to non-existent on cooking, heavy on education for the 'Fifties justifiably freaked-out set but presented in a peaceful manner because atomic energy is, after all, our fiend friend.
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BALE, Bob. How To Make an Atomic Bomb in Your Own Kitchen (Well, Practically). New York: Frederick Fell Inc,. 1951. First edition. Octavo. 191, [1]  pp. Cloth. Dust jacket.

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Image courtesy of Coconut Rose Rare Books and Autographs, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.
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L. Ron Hubbard's Infamous Forgery on Soviet Brainwashing

by Stephen J. Gertz

This notorious forgery, "A Synthesis of the Russian Text Book on Psychopolitics," originally published in 1955 and falsely attributed to Lavrentii Beria, the Chief of Stalin’s Secret Police, was actually written by science-fiction novelist and Scientology founder, in 1953, L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), who had a flair for creating pure fantasy worlds, including a fantasy religion-for-fee, and, apparently, fantasy politics. Until recently, American politics has rarely been more psycho.

The pamphlet was published under the imprint of the American Public Relations Forum, a conservative Catholic women’s group founded in 1952 by Southern California housewife, Stephanie Williams, who proclaimed to the opening meeting of the group, "We are the wives and mothers who are vitally concerned with what is happening in our country." David Seed, in Brainwashing: the Fictions of Mind Control (Kent State University Press, 2004) calls it “one of the strangest publications of the Cold War.”

Brain-Washing... purports to reprint a secret Soviet textbook and speech by Beria on mass mind-control techniques. Among the document’s many astounding claims is that “every chair of psychology in the United States is occupied by persons in our [Communist] connection.” Hubbard distributed the pamphlet to law enforcement agencies, and the forgery was sufficiently sophisticated to be taken seriously by President Eisenhower’s National Security Council.

While authorship has long been attributed to Hubbard, no one, to the best of our knowledge, has drawn a direct connection between this pamphlet and the contemporary hysteria surrounding the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act of 1956, widely decried as the “Siberia Act” by conservative conspiracy theorists who claimed the law would be used to subject anyone outside the liberal political mainstream to psychiatric testing and, of course, subsequent banishment.  The APRF claimed that the law, which provided for the transfer of a million acres of Federal land in Alaska to the local authorities to fund the cost of providing modern mental health service facilities in the territory, was intended to give the government authority to abduct citizens at will and imprison them in concentration camps in Alaska. Glenn Beck could not have said it better. Actually, Stephanie Williams did:

"We could not help remembering that Siberia is very near Alaska and since it is obvious no one needs such a large land grant, we were wondering if it could be an American Siberia."

For former Governors of the state with failed larger ambitions, perhaps, but there was a precedent for internment of U.S. citizens during wartime - and this was a war on Communism - so the American Public Relations Forum, while engaging in pretzel logic, was not completely irrational in its concern.

Whether this pamphlet was part of the APRF's campaign against the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act or not (its initial printing was issued a year before the controversy; subsequent issues may have had that purpose), it stands on its own as one of the most bizarre titles in the annals of American Right-Wing literature, and a testament to the imagination of a grade-z fringe writer who developed his gift of BS for the credulous into a breath- and wallet-taking pseudoscience psychobabble aliens-from-outer-space-our-spiritual-leaders creed that raised him to the status of America's most celebrated - and wealthy - charlatan of the twentieth century (but don't say that to a Scientologist).

Curiously, the electropsychometer (E-meter), Hubbard's quack contraption that he claimed could measure the pain felt by an eggplant and plays an important role in identifying the Scientology novice's psychological issues, is no where to be found within this book. What's brainwashing without a top-loading automatic washing machine?

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[HUBBARD, L. Ron]. Brain-Washing. A Synthesis of the Russian Text Book on Psychopolitics. Including an Address by Beria, Formerly Head of the Russian Secret Police. Burbank: American Public Relations Forum, [ca 1958]. 56pp. Staple-bound, textured buff wrappers, printed in black. 

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Image courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles: The Real Story

by Stephen J. Gertz

Listen, Do You Want To Know a Secret?  The truth has finally emerged, as truthy as truth can be. Finally, the Communist Master Music Plan has been exposed.

Before the Beatles went home, Back in the U.S.S.R. in 1968 and heard balalaikas ringing out, they invaded the U.S.A. in 1964 and  brought with them insidious secret Soviet techniques of Pavlovian mind-control for a thorough wash, rinse, and spin of the cerebral cortexes of American kids:

“...The destructive music of the Beatles merely reinforces the excitatory reflex of the youth to the point where it crosses the built-in inhibitory reflex. This in turn weakens the nervous system to a state where the youth actually suffers a case of artificial neurosis. And the frightening, even fatal, aspect of this mental breakdown process is the fact that these teenagers, in this excitatory, hypnotic state, can be told to do anything - and they will.”

Time has proven that the "artificial" neurosis of 1960s American youth was no more artificial than our sacred right to bear arms and die with a handgun to be pried from our cold, rigid digits. Baby Boomers are genuinely neurotic. Not our Boomers, of course, just Lefty Boomers.

Underground laboratories hidden beneath remote dales and bucolic glens throughout our fair land have discovered that the Beatles' classic love song, Michelle, when played backwards and slowed down,  is an ukase straight out of Red Square and the Kremlin that commands its listeners to, "Kill pigs, bad pigs,  ils sont des porcs bien connu comme étant prigs, oui ces porcs."

It's an all-out assault on liberty and the American way of life.

That French is superciliously recited with airy pretension and an English word thrown in for a cheap rhyme makes this threat even more insidious. We bailed the Frogs out of WWI and II and now they're killing us with French fries and conspiring with The Fab Four and the Comintern to rob our youth of their precious essence. D'gall!

It's enough to drive all true,  red-blooded Americans to purge themselves of godless hemoglobin so that only pure, white blood cells flow through our veins.

Who stands up for our children when they lie down to diabolical foreign influence and are ruthlessly trod upon by Marx and his brothers, Lenin, Stalin, and Zeppo?

I read the news today, oh boy. The Beatles were actually born in Kenya and raised to worship Baal. As if we didn't know.

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NOEBEL, David A. Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles: An Analysis of the Communist Use of Music - The Communist Master Music Plan. Tulsa: Christian Crusade Publications, 1965. Revised Third Edition. Octavo. Staple-bound illustrated wrappers. 26 pp.

This book went into not just three editions but, so popular, it went into five editions through 1965, winning that year's Noebel Prize for  Litterature.

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Image courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.

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Archives's Exhibit Exposes Espionage

Original European Union Poster For: Prague Through The Lens Of the Secret Police.

Imagine that every move in your ordinary, everyday life, was secretly photographed. Your seemingly innocuous activities, strolling through a park, munching on an apple, waiting for the subway, were considered so dangerous they were captured forever by the secret police. Sounds far fetched, doesn't it? But a traveling exhibit from the newly created Security Services Archive in the Czech Republic capital of Prague reveals that from 1968 to 1989 this was exactly what citizens in that city endured.

The exhibit, Prague Through The Lens Of The Secret Police, is on view at the Harvard University Center for Government and International Studies through December 21, 2009. It consists mainly of banner sized enlargements of the black and white photos snapped for over twenty years by citizen spies employed by the Cold War communist government.

The methods employed to obtain the photographs might seem almost comic if they weren't so oppressive. According to an article in The Harvard Gazette, the homegrown spies who worked as secret police agents concealed their cameras in "tobacco pouches, purses, briefcases, transistor radios, lighters, and on engine blocks (for mobile surveillance)." Film, and later, video cameras were hidden in parked cars, and even in baby carriages pushed by spies posing as proud parents.

A Series Of Surveillance Photos.
(The officers’ most commonly used exposure time was 1/125 of a second and often even 1/60 of a second.)

The resulting photos document a drab, gray, depressing Prague devoid of the most basic freedoms. A city strangled by a totalitarian regime, under which citizens were denied the freedom to think, speak, read, or assemble freely. Contrasting these photos with the city's now vibrant cultural and artistic scene, leads to the conclusion that the spies inadvertently documented the soul-crushing effect of their employer's tyranny.

The exhibit marks a new era in studies of the Cold War. Virtually all former Eastern Bloc countries are in the process of organizing and digitizing what were once highly classified documents hidden in secret, secure government files. The Prague Institute For The Study Of Totalitarian Regimes, which administers the Security Services Archive, is, by government mandate, free and open to all scholars, researchers, and curious citizens.

One attendee at the opening of the exhibit at Harvard knew first hand of the of all-seeing eye, and all-hearing ear, of the Czech Cold War government. Haviland Smith, the United States CIA station chief in Prague in 1958, recalled that when he and his wife were alone, settling into a Prague hotel room, Mrs. Smith complained to her husband that there was only one towel in the bathroom. "Within two minutes," said Smith, "there was a knock at the door, and a maid stood there with an armful of towels." Smith called such relentless, ubiquitous surveillance “an expression of the regime’s desire to stay in power -- nothing more, nothing less.”

Author Milan Kundera (right) Was One Surveillance Target.

At the opening reception for the exhibit, Jiri Ellinger, first secretary and head of the political section at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington, D.C., spoke to a crowd of about 150. He remarked that those documented in the photos were considered enemies of the state for a variety of reasons. One subject of surveillance, code named "Doctor A", was actually Zdenek Pinc, a professor of ancient philosophy at Prague's Charles University. "He was dangerous to the regime because he wanted to study and think freely." To a government bent on controlling the minds and souls of its citizens, even study of ideas expressed for thousands of years can seem perversely revolutionary.

Even Nuns Were Viewed As Dangerous By The Czech Secret Police.

The photographs in the exhibit have been collected in a 2009 coffee table book published by The Prague Institute For The Study Of Totalitarian Regimes. For information on obtaining the book, Prague Through The Lens Of The Secret Police, in English, send an inquiry to the archive at: info@kosmas.cz.

Posted by Nancy Mattoon