Follow Your Bliss (638 hits)
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Submitted by Domochevsky (View user info) at 2004-11-19 00:55:48 EST
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The following is an excerpt from the memoirs of Dr. Philip Leland. They were discovered in his home shortly after his death in 2002.
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Everyone is always telling you to "follow your heart" and "do what makes you happy". I guess that's what drove me to pursue my passion.
I'd been doing my dream job for 24 years. I quit recently, or rather stopped. You don't just quit my kind of work.
Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I can make those look like M-80's in comparison. The bomb that hit Hiroshima was 13 kilotons, and killed around 100,000 initially, not to mention those who died from radiation afterwards.
The kiloton scale is a description of how many tons of dynamite a bomb's yield is. 13 kilotons is roughly equivalent to 13,000 pounds of dynamite. At the height of the cold war, the US and Russia were making 20 megaton weapons. That's 1500 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.
I reconditioned and replenished those decommissioned weapons for the highest bidder.
Am I an immoral man? Perhaps. Was I willfully adding to the tensions in the world? Almost certainly.
You probably want to know why. I did it because its what I loved it. I was at peace when I made weapons of war, it's ironic, really. Even if what I did worked against the greater amity, I loved it. I am selfish, I suppose, but in truth I was only providing a service that there was a demand for. I prefered to think I was a business man.
In 1978 I graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics at 32. My thesis was titled "Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum by Induction through Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) from Mode-Locked Source Array". Catchy, isn't it?
After graduating, I left the Ivy-league world to pursue my discipline. Unfortunately for me, the cold war was over, and nuclear weapons programs were being dismantled worldwide, or at least that was what we were told. About 6 weeks from the one of Russia's disarmament announcements, I found myself in Kiev, fixing their Uranium-enrichment systems. Damn ruskies couldn't even enrich a little U-238 to form weapons-grade U-235. Idiots. I showed them how to get that system up and running, but then they forgot to set up the safety calibrations when they implemented it. Chernobyl wasn't a reactor malfunction from a fire; it was their U-238 stock going critical because they set it near a propane pipeline, but that part of the story was conveniently left out of the news reports.
After the disaster I went on to freelance work. I found a decommissioned chemical plant in the rural desert of Utah to set up shop. About 100 miles from nowhere, it was perfect. It's a surprisingly simple process to begin a uranium enrichment center of your own.
You see, all you have to do is bond U-238 to fluorine to create UF6, or uranium hexafluoride, at a conversion plant. UF6 decomposes it into gaseous form at about 50 degrees Celsius, at which point the gas is placed in the enriching device, which is a long series of boxes with miniscule holes in-between them; sort of a long chain of sealed boxes lying end-to-end but connected on their sidewalls to each other. From there, simply add a small sample of U-235 to the initial box, and it will naturally be drawn to interact with the more electronegative U-238 isotope. This reaction creates a fraction of a percent more U-235. This is repeated countless times, until the proper percent of U-238 has been enriched to form pure U-235.
The process is simple, but the effects are somewhat unpleasant. The depleted uranium has a half-life of 700 million years, meaning I just can't throw some barrels out back of the plant (although it has been done before). I sell most of the depleted stuff to the US government for their prototype electromagnetic rail gun tests, and the rest is sealed in titanium-lead containers and buried. It's an expensive and temporary solution at best, but I'm not going to be around for 700 million years to watch the stuff, and if the apparatuses I help create were to be used, no one else will, either.
I achieved a sort of black-market status from all this. The US looks the other way because I work for them, under the table of course. That, and they don't know who else I work for. My clients pay a high price for my products.
Normally I recondition small, low-yield bombs for terrorist groups and rogue governments looking to build a protective or preemptive arsenal. Usually.
The 'usually' is the reason I stopped.
One day in 1997 I was contacted by an anonymous organization informing me that a package would be arriving to me soon, and that I would receive further instructions when it was delivered. Three days later a black Mercedes with glass too dark to see through pulled up outside the plant, a man in a black suit exited from the passenger seat with a medium-sized chrome briefcase handcuffed to his arm.
How clichéd, I thought to myself.
He uncuffed the case from his arm, and quickly handed it to me, along with an envelope. The heat of the desert sun reflected harshly off of the case's metal surface. I looked at it blankly.
"Keep it safe." He told me in monotone voice. "It's worth more than you are."
He turned on his heals, quickly getting back into the car. The tires spun wildly in the desert sand as they sped off.
"What's this all about?" I said to myself as I escaped from the heat into the environment-controlled warehouse.
I took the case to the workbench; half expecting it to be a bomb intended to take me out. That would be a little too ironic, though.
I opened the envelope, still wondering what the hell this was all about. I normally don't accept anonymous and unexplained jobs. I shouldn't have broken that rule. Inside the envelope there was a bond for $1,000,000, and a piece of paper. I stared in disbelief. It is well known that my going rate for 20 kilotons and under is only $100,000.
I looked at the paper.
"You're probably wondering why there is ten times your asking price in this envelope. Open the case, combination 4-5-1, and you'll see why." It said.
I spun the case around on the table, finding the small keypad next to the latch.
4.5.1.
The latch clicked open with a mechanical whir.
I slowly lifted the heavy metal lid.
"Jesus..."
I'd only ever heard mutters in dark rooms about the existence of the soviet "suitcase bombs". The briefcase sized 10+ kiloton nuclear weapons developed near the end of the cold war. All it would take is to get one inside a city and remote detonate. Ashes and dust would be the only sign it was ever there. No ICBM launches, no satellite laser arrays shooting down missiles launched from foreign enemies, just a carrier to plant the case, and someone to push the remote detonator. Boom. Game over.
Russian authorities lost track of 8 of the 12 that were produced. They were supposedly destroyed or dismantled. It was said that maybe a few got out; when the government came crashing down the nuclear physicists and soldiers guarding these things were no longer being paid, and like me, would be happy to sell some information or product to make ends meet.
It didn't matter how at this point, what mattered was that I was looking at one of the most devastatingly covert weapons on the planet.
There was a note taped to the inside top of the case.
"Your reputation precedes you, Dr. Leland. Your task here is to recondition this device. My courier will return in 72 hours, whether you accept the offer or not. What you have so far is a down payment, $5,000,000 will be remitted once we have assurances that the device will function properly. Make your choice, Dr. Leland."
I looked once again at the case, then at the note.
I had work to do. God I loved that job
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I spend 24 hours straight in my hazard suit working in the radioactive room, culturing the UF6 through the enriching plant, checking the U-238 percentages. When the setup was complete I retired to the processing station to ensure that everything was going smoothly. I fell asleep watching the dials and readouts during the 33rd hour, the gentle hum of the computers sending me into a dreamless sleep.
I awoke in the cold data processing room where I had inadvertently rested. Shaking the sleep from my eyes I checked the readouts. Everything was in the green.
I reduced the chamber temperature, as I suited up once again. I sat, looking at the temperature dropping on the computer screen. 60 degrees. 58. 55. I snapped down my visor, and opened the door back into the decontamination chamber. I retrieved the enriched uranium for the bomb with the long manipulator arms inside.
I began preparations to prime the device. It used a gun-type detonation, where a small piece of uranium is propelled by a non-nuclear explosion at a larger piece of uranium at the end of an internal barrel. The two pieces striking each other splits enough of the atoms in each U-235 sample to attain critical mass and begin the self-sustaining reaction. In layman's terms, it goes bang.
Using the manipulator arms I placed the bomb in my lead-lined chamber. Uranium is far too radioactive to handle directly, so it entered the chamber via conveyor from the enrichment room. I primed the device, adding the small explosives at one end to power the collision, and adjusting the firing mechanism for use with the enriched samples. It took about 6 more hours to get the calculations and calibrations to check out.
I rewarded myself on completion with some much-needed sleep, calmly resting mere yards from my creation, sealed securely in the lead room.
The next day the same black Mercedes was waiting outside. I had the package sealed and ready for transport long before they arrived.
The man in the suit took it back in much the same way it was delivered, handcuff and all.
"We will wire you the rest of the payment to this account when we are able to determine the device's integrity. Goodbye, Dr. Leland." He dais, handing me a small scrap of paper with a German bank account number scribbled on it.
I had my money before the week was out.
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Two years later a nuclear device was detonated near the Tokaimura nuclear fuel-processing plant in north-eastern Japan by the "Aum Shinrikyō", the same group responsible for the Sarin gas attacks on the subway systems in 1995. I suppose they were trying to get the reactor there to go critical. All they did was create a uranium leak, and that's all the news reported. I was contacted by one of my sources letting me know what had actually gone on; It had been my bomb that had gone off. In the country which had been the victim of the original attacks 50 years ago, no less.
Then it hit me: In all my years prepping nuclear devices and building weapons, never had anything I'd made actually been used. They were always meant for defense, not offense. I sat watching the screen, seeing the destruction, and despair of those who had survived. Letting the gravity of exactly what I had been involved with sink in, I cried for some time.
The next day I had steeled my resolve. I love what I do for a living, but I could never do it again.
I set the enriching device going, making sure to place more than enough uranium in it to reach critical mass. My old plant is a crater in the Utah desert now. Fortunately, the government covered their ass; it went on record as a "nuclear test site" that, when the test explosion was unfortunately detonated too early, killed Dr. Philip Leland, the test supervisor. No one else was injured.
The Caribbean is alright, I guess. I like the drinks and the white sandy beaches, crawling with attractive young girls to ogle from behind my dark sunglasses. It's been a while since I had a vacation, too long in fact. The only strange part is that this one is permanent.
I took enough money to live on before leaving, I had the rest given to the Japanese government and various humanitarian charities. It was from "a concerned philanthropist" as far as they were told. I doubt it will absolve my spirit, though.
As I sit on the beach, some days I wonder about how I will answer for myself, if we are indeed judged. I somehow doubt that Saint Peter will care that I was just following my bliss.
Oh well, Ces't la vie, as they say. I'm content living out the rest of my days beneath the radar here on Nasau. The cerulean blue of the water soothes my mind, and the soft sound of the waves breaking on the shore drowns out the deafening cacophony of the explosion I hear over and over again in my mind. I still miss my work, calculating the percentages, working the machines, the hiss of the hazard suit's air tank. I guess that's a sign that you really loved it though, isn't it?
Also, if you're ever out in the Utah desert, around 51 N 112 W, don't hang around too long. The area will be radioactive for the next 1.4 billion years. I'm sorry about that, too.
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