Army socks. The give away.
WENDER: I never thought anything of it.

Radioactive iodine and radioactive ruthenium where were coming out of the smokestacks all over the place and they wondered what affect does this have on people.

There went your disguise.
WENDER: But that’s how it was. Well, we showed up and I was assigned to work with radioactive iodine and radioactive ruthenium where were coming out of the smokestacks all over the place and they wondered what affect does this have on people. I had to generate radioactive iodine as a gas so rats could breathe in the iodine. People from biology then cut up the rats to find out what body organs took up the iodine. Iodine went quickly to the thyroid and then out, in seven days, in the urine. I had a hard time generating gaseous ruthenium. This metal was made volatile by converting it to ruthenium tetroxide— RU04— which is volatile.

Your purpose was studying the effects of these two materials?
WENDER: Well, I was the fellow who had to get the iodine, and then the ruthenium and then manage to put that into the air in measured amounts so researchers could have rats inhale it as this gas is going through. I had to gasify them and measure them. The purpose was to find out which organs of the body were attacked by these radioisotopes.

And where was this material emitted? You mentioned smokestacks?
WENDER: Hanford, Washington where they were making atom bombs.

You were in the army. What was the mood of the people in the country? Were they thinking about the war? Was there a great sense of patriotism?
WENDER: Tremendous. Not like today. [Laughs.]

Were you allowed to speak to your friends and family about your work?
WENDER: No. I remember my younger brother, a chemical engineer, came to Chicago once and we were walking around and he asked me what were we working on. I said I couldn’t tell him and we talked about a lot of things, he was at MIT at the time, and he mentioned atom bomb. And later on, after the war, he said, “I knew what you were working on” and I said “what do you mean?” and he said “you lit up like a Christmas tree when I said atom bomb.”

The number one [option] was drop the bomb, the number two [option] was drop the bomb on an island … and the number three was the project doesn’t exist. You were in the army four years?

You were in the army four years?
WENDER: November of 1942 until February of 1946.

How long after your work in Chicago did the U.S. deploy the bomb?
WENDER: They did it while I was there. Just before the bomb was lit, we took a sort of survey in the lab. The number one [option] was drop the bomb, the number two [option] was drop the bomb on an island and give the Japanese a week or two to surrender, and the number three was the project doesn’t exist, just wipe it out. Everybody voted for number two. But the bomb was dropped. And I think you know how I feel about that. People object to the bomb dropping but it had to be dropped because of the Potsdam Conference. Truman told Stalin that we have a great big bomb. There was some exchange of information. So Truman told Stalin that. Stalin laughed because he knew about the bomb already. But if we hadn’t dropped the bomb how would we know how much damage it could do. They should have dropped just one bomb, I don’t think they needed two. I think they wanted to test another type of bomb at Nagasaki. The worst thing about the United States and the bomb was that they had two bombs when all of this went off. Just two. After the war, there were thousands of bombs that they made. The war was all done. And we made bombs. We have thousands now. There was no war— it was the cold war. It’s something people don’t really know.

What did you do after you left the army?
WENDER: There was a fellow there who worked for me who was from Pittsburgh. He worked for the Bureau of Mines and he told me that there were some openings there in chemistry. So I applied. That’s how I got to Pittsburgh and it worked out and I came here with a provision that I made that I’d be allowed to go to school here because I had only a master’s degree at that time. I went to school any time without asking, and when I got to be director I encouraged people to continue their studies.

The U.S. is dependent on oil. Some say that our intervention into the Middle East is to seek oil resources. The source of much argument and conflict. Do you feel that the country’s activity in the Middle East is oil resource related?
WENDER: Well I really don’t know. I feel that oil is involved tremendously, let’s put it that way. What would we be doing with Saudi Arabia— the close relationship we have— if it weren’t for their oil. We have to be friends with Saudi Arabia. Most of the oil comes from Saudi Arabia

So let’s talk about nuclear weapons for a moment. There are roughly eight countries that have declared— and maybe one or two who have them that haven’t quite declared— Israel for instance has really not declared as having nuclear weapons, it’s widely accepted that they do. Very much in the news has been Iran. Its enrichment of uranium, its controversial President Ahmedemijad, saying that they’re not enriching for the purpose of a nuclear weapon. The U.S. has set foreign policy that prevents Iran from having nuclear weapons.
WENDER: You know the latest thing that’s come out, that they’ve stopped working.

The National Intelligence Estimate…
WENDER: I just read reports in the Times and last night the Iranian ambassador was interviewed by Charlie Rose. He claims that we just maligned them. He shouldn’t have called them the axis of evil, which I don’t think we should have. Claimed that they were just going out for power and had nothing to do with building bombs. And he said that Iran would never build bombs. I wonder why he said that, but he did.

Yes, I’ve heard that, that nuclear weapons are actually against the Islamic religion.
WENDER: I don’t think that’s true, but anyway…

So countries like India, Pakistan, Israel. Does the proliferation of nuclear weapons pose a valid problem?
WENDER: Well, with the proliferation of countries that have bombs and the unstable nature of some of those countries, Pakistan is a prime example, which could easily fall into the hands of people we would not like to have those bombs. I think it’s a very precarious situation. A number of countries that have this bomb and a number of people who would like to get hold of this bomb. It’s fairly easy to make a bomb anyway, by stealing it.