Barry Farber
Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2003

Surely you’re aware we lost Johnny Cash, singer, and John Ritter, actor. Those two beloved celebrities deserved every anguished and loving tribute a saddened America accorded them.

Star power being what it is in our world, however, you may have missed mention of the passing of two other notables. They were not singers. They were not actors.

I refer to the passing of the woman who made Adolf Hitler and the man history calls the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.”

Let me be quick to assure you this will not be one of those annoying lamentations about our twisted priorities. What follows is not my version of the frequent and loudly mouthed complaint that “All we care about are celebrities! We pay rock stars more than professors and ball players more than laboratory researchers fighting murderous diseases!”

Sure, I personally think your nearest competent surgeon and enthusiastic schoolteacher are more valuable than Madonna and Britney Spears – whether separate and apart or in the act of swapping tonsils – but I long ago learned to get over it and get a life.

All I aim for is the chance to use my little illuminated moment on stage here to say at least something about Leni Riefenstahl, the woman who made Adolf Hitler, and Dr. Edward Teller, the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.

Leni Riefenstahl lived to the age of 101. Long before Americans had terms like “hype,” “spin,” “image” or even “PR” for “public relations“ (and the Germans probably still don‘t!), Leni Riefenstahl showed how cinematic manipulation could move a nation like Germany from curiosity about a controversial upstart leader into an orgy of rapturous idolatry that led to the loss of at least 60 million lives.

Her film, “Triumph of the Will,” spun off of one of Hitler’s monster rallies in the city of Nuremberg, had the power to convert the most bored and apolitical inhabitant of any one of those cobblestone villages in 1930s Germany into a stark-raving storm trooper with a viagra-stiff right arm in the air yelling, “Sieg Heil!” And looking around for a non-Aryan untermensch to beat up.

And she lived a long and comfortable life marinated in fame, attention and even admiration – only slightly grudging admiration – even from the likes of the ostensibly anti-fascist New York Times.

Those who are here know what Ronald Reagan’s “There he goes again!” did to Jimmy Carter. And those who are here know what Walter Mondale’s “Where’s the beef?” did to his opponent Gary Hart.

Those who were there, in Nazi Germany, know what Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” did for Adolf Hitler. It converted him into a god, in the hearts of many Germans – a god, in fact, with a not-so-small “G.”

If you were waiting for Leni Riefenstahl to show any remorse for her Hitler-building achievement you’re now in the position of a disowned relative left out of the will.

Dr. Edward Teller showed no remorse, either, for giving us the H-bomb. Before we had the term “political correctness,” the full artillery of that force was deployed to destroy his image and make him look like a Hungarian-accented scientific serpent of evil. Despite all the anti-bomb pressure beginning in the 1960s, he continued to insist unapologetically that the bigger the bomb, the stronger the deterrent against war. In that sometimes-strident insistence, Dr. Teller showed that he had an inventory of guts to match his brains.

Edward Teller’s life reminds us of the one towering irony of World War II that has never been rubbed in quite enough. Namely, if Hitler had forgotten about the Jews and focused on conquering the world, he might very well have succeeded!

After all, the Jews of Germany fought as loyal Germans all through World War I. Many Jewish veterans of that war marched bewildered and disbelieving into the Nazi gas chambers wearing the Iron Crosses awarded them for battlefield bravery.

If Hitler had not made the persecution of Jews his priority, he would have had Einstein, Teller and at least a half-dozen other over-achieving Jewish scientists doing for him what they escaped Germany to do, instead, for America.

Dr. Teller emerged from the team that succeeded in developing the A-bomb into the major figure responsible for developing the vastly more powerful H-bomb. And for that scientific deed he earned, as noted above, not gratitude, but American hatred and ridicule.

Thanks to his adamant, unapologetic belief that more and more powerful nuclear weapons were not a danger to peace but rather a deterrent to war, he was pilloried and savaged by the left, who saw him as a kind of “Nazi” sprout that had been transplanted into America’s good-guy garden and taken root.

There was even a movie in which a thinly disguised Edward Teller type was portrayed as a mad scientist bent upon destroying the whole world. The movie was “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

Let the left rave on and on. And let history’s astringent voice blister through.

You say you hate war? You say you love peace? Good. In that case, you should kneel and burn dried sassafras root and give thanks at the altar of, yes, the A-bomb and the H-bomb!

The dreary cycle of European wars every 20 years was as accepted as the trajectory of Halley’s Comet. Every 20 years there would be a war; count on it. The Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II.

And that’s the way it was. Spiders weave webs. Beavers build dams. And Europeans waged World Wars every 20 years.

In the year 1966 a gigantic gong was sounded. Nobody heard it. It was a silent gong. But it was one of the most important sounds in the history of the world. At some mathematically determinable point in that year, exactly as much time had elapsed from the end of World War II to that silent gong as had elapsed from the end of World War I to the BEGINNING of World War II. (You’re allowed to read that sentence twice!)

In other words, at that point in 1966 the “peace” clock started. Every second, minute, hour, day, year, etc., from that point forward was time – PEACE time – that was given to us by those who gave us the A-bomb and the H-bomb. Their “diabolical” device had the angelic result of making war between nation-states unthinkable. The cycle of war every 20 years was broken.

When Dr. Teller was a guest on my radio show he complained like an author of a book being made into a movie who is NOT allowed on the set to watch the filming. He had invented the hydrogen bomb, OK, but he wasn’t allowed to go to the South Pacific to witness the testing. He festered and fulminated, but the military wouldn’t let him attend the test.

No problem. Science can overcome bureaucracy. Dr. Teller, unlike the rest of us, at least knew precisely when and where the hydrogen bomb would be tested. He calculated how many minutes and seconds it would take the shock of the blast to course through the crust of the earth and show up on the West Coast of America.

As a celebrity of science, he knew he’d be as free to walk into any California seismograph unexpected as Arnold Schwarzenegger would be to visit a weight-lifting gym.

Dr. Edward Teller, at precisely 10 minutes before the shock of a successful bomb test would register, sauntered over to a California seismograph station to pay a “social” call on his colleagues. As he’d hoped and expected, at the instant he expected it, the seismograph started hooting and hollering and buzzing and flashing and blasting – and Edward Teller knew the test of the hydrogen bomb was successful.

He bid a dignified farewell to his friends and headed to a Western Union office to send a telegram. (Western Union offices were where we went to send messages before we had e-mail!)

Dr. Edward Teller’s telegraphic message to his team of colleagues back at Los Alamos was a gem of what the intelligence agencies call “open code.”

He wired simply, “It’s a boy!”

Barry Farber was named by Talkers magazine as one of the top 10 radio talk hosts of all time.

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