Peter A Berardo, PhD

Dirty "secrets". As an historical novel, Cold War Warrior has some: Chemical, biological, and radiological (CBR) warfare; animal and human radiation experimentation; nuclear war planning. Of course, since they are in this book, they are not really secret. And they never were. But in part, that is why this book exists. To consider a bit more about them and how one person might react to and deal with them in the context of the cold war. This book doesn’t draw conclusions or make recommendations. I don’t know enough to do so. Nor does it represent my views, which may vary with time and circumstance. However, if it influences your views in some way, or whets your curiosity, that’s terrific. If you feel like telling me about it, that’s more terrific.

Between pacifists

And militarists

Are the rest of us.

                         - PT

The decisions that Paul makes in Cold War Warrior are not profound. Early decisions are guided primarily by fear of war and death and are easy to make. Later decisions are guided by a spiritual quest grounded in science and are similarly easy. Yet the chain of decisions leads him through profound circumstances. After being on the leading edge of the cold war, the war on cancer, and the pursuit of knowledge of knowledge, Paul discovers the wisdom and peace of acceptance.

SYNOPSIS: COLD WAR WARRIOR

By Peter Berardo

From Pearl Harbor to the end of the Soviet Union, Paul learns about, lives with, and believes he will be killed in war. With patriotic opposition, with fear, planning, and luck, he escapes hot wars. To do so, he enlists in America’s longest, most dangerous, and most expensive war, the cold war. As a scientist and citizen soldier, Dr. Rossi, 1^st Lieutenant, USAR, enters the chambers of chemical, biological, and radiological warfare, the arenas of war-games with mutual assured destruction and deterrence, the theaters of strategic planning and pitiless projections, the logistics of intelligent war machines, and finally the sanctuaries of social and environmental restitution. He is proud of his safe and significant role in keeping the cold war from becoming hot. Yet, when he dares to face the memorials for those killed in hot wars, his pride dissolves. He realizes that he and they had different assignments, but that together, most fundamentally, they are and always will be comrades in arms and in victory.

On the home front, as a boy, Paul learns about air-raid blackouts, airplane crashes, Navy bases and hospitals, sacrificing for the war effort, eating colored lard. He gets boxes of exotic shells his father sends from the South Pacific. He studies maps that show the black, front lines of death, learns of the unmerciful atomic bomb, sees heaps and holes filled with skinny, murdered people, the glory and grimness of war movies, and lives through the first hydrogen bomb test that threatens to burn the sky.

Paul admires his father’s WWII patriotism, although his duty overseas shatters their physical and emotional bonds. Paul shares his country’s pride in victory over evil, pride in freeing victims of greed and inhumanity, pride in America’s values. However, regardless of his father’s example, Paul knows that above all, he will avoid war.

On familiarization tours at home and abroad, Paul learns that both individuals and countries constantly push, challenge, threaten, and fight one another. School bullies, Soviet Communist bullies, Chinese Communist bullies, the military draft, and ROTC required in college; these define the rules of life for Paul as a young man.

When he takes a year out of college to travel, he learns first hand about smashed and occupied Berlin, the embarrassing insults endured by Turkish officers as their wives are hustled by US military advisors, the turmoil in Iran about the US-supported Shah, the anger of people in Pakistan when the U2 is shot down over Russia, and the strong support for communism in India. He learns that many, many people in the world know The Ugly American as more than a book.

When he returns home, to avoid the draft, he reluctantly joins the ROTC advanced course at UCLA, his father’s alma mater. He plans not to be commissioned and marries. At summer camp he learns about the Green Berets, Vietcong guerillas, and pungi sticks. Even a family and degree don’t exempt him from the draft for this new war. To escape Vietnam, he takes a commission in the Chemical Corps and goes to graduate school. He studies nuclear and particle physics at the WWII cyclotron in Berkeley, joins Vietnam peace marches, and is gassed by the National Guard. Finally, the Army refuses to extend his delay. He passes his last Ph.D. oral exam three hours before his flight to active duty.

On active duty, Paul goes to the Chemical Officer Basic Course in Anniston, Alabama. Berkeley was poor preparation for the real-world. Lecture, demonstration, and field exercises inflict the niceties of conventional, chemical, biological, and radiological warfare.

To evade the Vietnam hot war and Army field assignments, Paul extends his active duty in exchange for a states-side research assignment. He is stationed at Bethesda Naval Hospital and performs nuclear experiments on animals and people.

Finally out of school, with a reliable income, a wife and two sons, military rank and medals, Paul and his father reconcile their differences over Paul’s evasion of war.

When no civilian job is available, he takes a second assignment with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at Strategic Air Command HQ. There he helps plan nuclear-war deterrence through Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). With his degree and maturity, Paul becomes friends with senior and flag officers. Although officially an admiral’s aide, he joins as an equal in defining what it means to win a nuclear war.

To avoid troop duty and a military career, Paul wants to leave the Army, even with probable tenure at Westpoint. A friend from Berkeley calls and says that Paul is the only person in the US with the necessary combination of experience in computers, physics, and radiobiology to work on a new cancer project for the National Institutes of Health. He is discharged as a major.

In academia, he joins the University of California to work on cancer radiation therapy and radiobiology in Los Alamos, the site of the Manhattan Project. To Paul, the application of nuclear and particle physics to medicine is rewarding and redeeming, especially at this historical hot and cold war lab, sister to the radiation lab at Berkeley.

In aerospace, to elude Star Wars R&D and to explore machine intelligence, he transfers to Lockheed. He works in Austin on intelligent computers, in San Fernando Valley on artificial intelligence, and in Silicon Valley on autonomous robots. The cold war ends and his work focuses on environmental cleanup of radioactive waste and the destruction of chemical weapons, to which he had directly and indirectly contributed.

The US withdraws from Vietnam, the Soviet Union disbands, and the Berlin wall is destroyed. For Paul, hot and cold wars are over. He has survived them both.

Basic physics, animal experiments, nuclear war plans, cancer therapy, artificial intelligence, rockets, robots, military production, automated maintenance, nuclear waste, and chemical weapons; these are some of the fascinating and fearful things he explores. Los Angeles, Berkeley, Bethesda, Washington, D.C., Omaha, Los Alamos, Austin, and Silicon Valley; those are the exciting and exotic places he lives.

Paul is satisfied that he helped win the cold war and began to remedy its effects. He is satisfied that he found a safe, unique, and useful path in life. Yet when he visits war memorials in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento, he is surprised at his empty sense of victory and weeps for his friends and classmates who died in Vietnam. He realizes he is still a comrade-in-arms, hot war or cold war. Just as the sacrifices of hot-war warriors are often undervalued, he accepts that most people will never know the battles of military, academic, and industrial cold-war warriors. Not even his father.

.