It is truly difficult to explain the limits of national desperation to a person for whom loss of WiFi is a tragedy...
I work at a Site that has been in operation for a long time. Yesterday I passed by some... not quite... ruins...
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The window faces South.
It says nothing. Can it?
Sixty
years ago, this building was new, concrete and glass, two hundred
offices, in which obscure incantations and rites resulted in brief but
violent magic.
Violent? Not the right word by orders of magnitude.
I spell: N-u-c-l-e-a-r.
Three-quarters
of the Earth fears that word, so much so that mentioning the existence
of the office behind this window once meant prison, and mentioning some
of the words uttered within to the wrong people meant certain death at
the hands of Federal agents as ruthless as the Mob.
I spell: C-e-r-t-a-i-n.
Half
a mile away, there's an anti-aircraft artillery site, where radar,
cannons and missiles watched constantly to see that this place was
undisturbed. Yes. Anti-aircraft artillery. In the American woods. There are seven more nearby.
A quiet
man in this office thought deeply, and figured, and figured, and figured
some more, and a path opened to him and others like him as he peeled
Reality itself for the fruit inside: he could turn a heavy metal and a
light one into something brighter than the Sun.
Today,
I can walk by his window unmolested. I imagine I can see an older,
bespectacled scientist, possibly who knows Albert personally, worried
about whether his idea will work, worried about what the guards will say
when they see him looking at the outside world, worried about how his
discoveries will be used.
He pauses to remember his wife
telling him to take it easier, but he is unable to stop himself. He has
to know. And he knows that it is better he than someone else, someone
broken, someone evil with the desire to get even at... something...
And then that light played across his face. A solution...
So he succeeded, he and his professional brothers, so that his neighbors could punish a foe with a fire Satan could not handle.
And that job was finished, and he went home, and stayed home with his smiling and proud lady.
The
Sun crosses the sky slowly. Shadows crawl across the wall and the
bare concrete floor and then the other wall with its ribs exposed,
silently marking the time as nothing happens, anywhere - today as in the
last forty years. The windowframe says, "Pop!" once, goaded into speech
by the heat, but no one hears it. There isn't even a clock to whirr or
tick.
The air conditioner still roars on the lawn
nearby, as if the office will be occupied again. Carefully, it filters
air drawn... underground. It's fresh.
The window faces South. It says nothing. Can it?
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This isn't "fake news". It takes a minimum of poetic license. Yes, American agents would kill someone who disclosed nuclear weapons development secrets.
What would make you think that such methods are not in use today?