27 April 2006

Melt Down

It did not have to happen, and that is the tragedy about it. The melt down at Chernobyl occurred after an exercise in which the crew monitoring the Number Four Reactor shut down the cooling loop to test their emergency procedures.

Number Four got away from them, and the result was the worst nuclear disaster of the atomic age. The exclusion zone around the sarcophagus is going to be hot for a few hundred years.

The power that fuels the cosmos is not to be treated lightly, even if it is in the Five Year Plan. 

The Chernobyl plant had four 1,000-megawatt reactors. It was one of the first of more than a dozen nuclear power plants in the old Soviet Union. Power from the Atom was a high priority for the Communist government, and odd thing, since their gas and oil resources were so vast.

Perhaps it was a legacy of Stalin, who knew that the atom kept Russia in its seat at the Big Table, and the fact that the infrastructure to bring the petroleum to market was still immature.

Nuclear power was the mainstay of the Navy that was designed to counter the fleets of the United States on the world ocean, powering submarines to strike the carrier battle groups and keep ballistic missiles poised for strike against cities of the main enemy.

Hundreds of nuclear submarines were commissioned and put to sea. The numbers really were quite staggering.

They were my life for a while, tracking them and plotting their locations, and planning for their destruction, should it come to that.

There was grand adventure out there on the world ocean, the contest between the Communist submarines and the Capitalist ones. If I wore a hat, I would take it off in tribute to those who cruised in the bosom of the deep, silent and unseen.

I could tell you stories about those days, but times being what they are, I will keep my memories filed away under their code names. Ask a real submariner at some fleet re-union and they will probably tell you. They are prod of what they did. That is how the material was gathered for the last block-buster book about the life and times of the submarine force in the Cold War. We were instructed by message not to speak of it, even with the stories in print.

In our way we were honoring the sacrifice of the Silent Service.

The melt down of the Soviet Union happened at the mid-point of my military career. I was on a ship in the Mediterranean when the Berlin Wall fell, and it was a moment of breathtaking surrealism. In my safe I had the plans for the ultimate contingency, and now the enemy was melting away before our very eyes.

Extraordinary things had been happening for months, but I took the Soviet Union as an article of faith, something that would always be there, like a marriage.

We were married, in a way. There were small Russian naval ships that followed our carriers around. They were sacrificial pawns in the great game. They reported our positions, and would be the first thing we killed, if ordered to do something. They understood their function, as we did ours.

At the dawn of the war on terror I found myself off the coast of Iran. An embassy had been occupied, and diplomats had been taken hostage. Washington did not quite know what to do then, something in common with the mess we find ourselves in today. This was not a situation that occurred in the ponderous process of the Cold War.

Three aircraft carriers and all their pilot cruisers and destroyers came together in the Northern Arabian Sea. Someone thought that a group portrait of the armada would be a good thing to have in the future, when all the oid sailors were dozing by the fire.

So the plan was made, and the intricate formation was devised that would keep all the iron going in the same direction. A flashing light signal was sent to the lone Russian with us, inviting him to take a safe formation in the lines of warships.

He was, after all, on a congruous mission with ours. He declined and fell back as the carriers Nimitz and Kitty Hawk took flanking positions on Midway, which had the position of honor as the oldest and most senior carrier in the fleet . I had nothing in particular to do at that moment in world history, and climbed to the top of the island to watch the show.

Photos were taken from helicopters and F-14s, and when the Kodak Moment was complete, the formation broke up in good order. The Russian stayed with us, snuggling back up to the formation.

It seems quaint now, considering that we were all armed with nuclear weapons. We drilled and practiced their security, control and use, if called upon. Their presence among us was always there, palpable.

We put them aside after the melt-down, since they were no longer needed for deterrence. The ones that remain are secure in bunkers somewhere.

Now the Iranians and the North Koreans are feverishly trying to produce their own. I imagine their designs will be crude, probably based on the sketches of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the noted Pakistani proliferator of madness.

But crude or elegant, the weapons of this new century will require a new calculus in the relationship of nations. It is too bad, really. When we were married to the Communists, everyone knew what they were supposed to do.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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