[ExI] robo-rescue

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> 
Subject: Re: [ExI] robo-rescue

 

Spike, I don't know if any gold was shipped to Los Alamos, but a vast amount of silver went to Oak Ridge to make the magnets for the isotope sorting caldrons. I can't think of any use for gold going to Los Alamos, but if you can find any reference, please post it.  

 

The point of thick armor is that you can just ignore drones; they just will not cause any damage if they hit thick armor. 


Keith

 

 

 

The (relatively small) gold request was to cover for the silver request.  I don’t recall where I heard it, so it might be wrong.  In that version of the story, the treasury was astonished when they received all the gold and silver back, with none of it missing, with the gold still in its original form but the silver having been made into wire.

 

That wasn’t the monument to government waste that they expected.  A divers attraction known as Million Dollar Point wins the prize for a monument to the wastefulness of war.  The story I heard was that Vanuatu was used as a massive supply base in the South Pacific during the period when the US anticipated a land invasion of Japan.  The advance in the Pacific happened faster than the allies anticipated, so the front was already way forward of Vanuatu by mid summer of 1945.

 

After the Japanese surrender, all this equipment was still at Van, much of it still in crates.  The English and French negotiated for the equipment at 6 cents on the dollar, but anticipated that the US would just abandon it all at which time they would get it free.  The US chose to dump it all in the sea rather than give it away.  Now it is a tourist attraction for scuba divers:

 

https://www.diveoclock.com/destinations/Oceania/Vanuatu/Million_Dollar_Point/

 

Secrecy was complete.  The Navy didn’t know there was an atomic bomb under development, so everyone continued on the course.  Secrecy is something the military is good at, but security was a nightmare at Los Alamos because it employed so many foreign scientists, guys who could not be cleared under ordinary circumstances.  The Europeans were way ahead of the USA in the disciplines needed for making the bomb.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

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