AN: Edited by Gremlin Jack, perfect_shade and Nla Eid
Someone recently pointed out that it's Hambruck, not Hamburg. I fixed it for this chapter, but I'm not going back to all of the previous chapters to fix that typo.
1951, August 28th, Hambruck:
I was getting ready for my first TV show. I had reached out to our old contacts in the Telefunken corporation. They were initially skeptical of the idea of a television talk host as no one had yet done anything on par with what I've seen in my previous world, until I mentioned that I would be the one doing it. It didn't take long for them to find a TV broadcasting company that was interested in the talk host business.
"We're starting in one minute." One of the crew members said.
"I'm feeling jittery. You?" Visha asked.
"Excited." I smiled. "I can actually say an opinion without having everyone think that it's the one and only way things should be run."
"We are going live in 10 seconds!" The camera operator shouted.
I glanced at my notes one last time before then putting on my best smile just as the camera went live.
"Good evening Germania, and welcome to "Tonight with Tanya von Degurechaff! It's good to be back home again! I would also like to thank the Germanian government for providing us with plenty of topics that we will be covering for a while…"
1951, September 4th, Hambruck:
The doorbell rang as I was working on writing out plans for the next few shows. The smashing success we had in our first ever show was certainly leaving me bubbly. Seeing that Visha was busy trying to prep an Akinese cuisine dish that she learned about back when we were traveling abroad, I walked over to the door and opened it.
There was no one at the door, but there was a sealed letter at the doorstep. I opened it to see what was in it.
It was a letter from Elya. I shut the door and walked over to my desk to read through it. In short, Captain Rickover was facing a disciplinary review board, coincidentally after Lergen had resigned over the military restructuring and the disaster in Caucasia. I remember seeing the public speech from Lergen on TV where he said, "The crisis in Caucasia was not caused by insufficient military forces, but by political mismanagement. And it will not be ended by military forces, only through proper political management. Peace is impossible under the current circumstances."
That reminds me, I should probably meet up with Lergen to see how he's doing.
I smiled as an idea came to my head.
I could reach out to Ugar to see what he could do about Captain Rickover's situation, so that the president doesn't get his way with building cheap and unsafe reactors. Hopefully I don't have to go publicly defend Captain Rickover and embarrass the military and the current administration.
1951, September 16th, somewhere in Germania:
Normally I would have been skeptical of an invitation delivered anonymously to our door like the previous letter. It asked us to go to a remote cabin in the middle of the wilderness and a specific request for us to fly there using stealth spells, but the letter from Elya said she wished to discuss some private topics with us.
After Visha and I arrived and opened the cabin door, we saw Elya was seated at a table with lunch food that you would expect at a picnic. I could also tell that the privacy spell was running as well.
"Tanya! Visha! It's been a long time! Take a seat!" Elya greeted us.
When we got seated, I cautiously nibbled at a piece of bread until Elya started eating. Maybe I'm just being paranoid of the food being drugged, but Elya is in a very powerful position with her BND. I just wished that I recognized how much power she wielded during and before the Second Europan War.
"Regarding that letter of recommendation you wrote for Captain Rickover, the disciplinary review board refused to see it." Elya sighed.
Oh, so she knew about that as well. Visha gave me a confused look.
"I suppose you might have had a role in 'accidentally' leaking that letter to the press to trigger the public backlash against the Navy and President Paul?" I asked.
"Accidents do indeed happen." Elya shrugged her shoulders. "But Captain Rickover found a way to avoid getting fired. By making an offer to President Paul that he couldn't resist, which is why I am here."
"What did he offer?" Visha raised her eyebrow.
"I don't know the direct details, but there was a large number of documents that were sent from Rickover's office to Paul during and after the disciplinary hearing. Then the Chancellor asked me what Degurechaff would do if she could deploy mages from submarines with near infinite underwater endurance and sustained high speed."
I swallowed the bite of the sandwich that I was chewing on. "You're telling me Rickover had sold the President the idea of nuclear powered submarines, and the President might also be pushing to make them capable of launching nuclear missiles?"
"The Chancellor didn't mention that detail, but I wanted to find a confirmation of my suspicions." Elya sighed.
"The Navy is limited on how many submarines they can build for prototype and operational usage." Visha said. "Unless… Paul intends on 'renegotiating' the naval treaty with the Albish."
"What a coincidence that the Albish was open to having us renegotiate the terms and in return keep silent about their referendum shenanigans in Alsace-Lorraine." Elya laughed. "I guess they will have to decide if they would rather allow us to have nuclear submarines or be publicly embarrassed. It would be awkward for the Albish to refuse to allow us to build our submarine fleet as we're slowly gathering intel about the CSR's submarines."
"And even if the Albish refuse, do you really think Paul is going to take a no for an answer?" Visha asked.
"Nothing will get in his way on his crusade of wiping out communism in baptism of fire. Yes, the Diet, Chancellor and elements of the military will keep trying to restrain him, but he is a persistent person and it's a coincidence that he had been making moves against all three to weaken them. Such as making secret deals with various fringe parties to weaken major parties and pressuring the Chancellor to appoint people that were loyal to him. Probably had a role in pushing the GWP over the cliff, but I don't have any hard information on that. Also, he switched his nuclear focus to 'tactical' nuclear weapons not too long ago, such as infantry portable rockets, landmines and air-to-air missiles with nuclear warheads."
I nearly spat out my drink. "Nuclear portable rockets, landmines and aircraft launched missiles?!"
"Military officers that support President Paul's nuclear warfare had been pushing for those two project ideas." Elya sighed. "The idea with those two weapons are for situations where using nuclear bombs or missiles would be inappropriate, such as the CSR's shelling of the two islands. And 'hypothetically' it would not be severe enough to push the CSR into unleashing their biological weapons. As for the air-to-air missile, I believe the air force is hoping to trick him into allowing the development of a missile guidance system and a high speed, high maneuverability jet."
"And the CSR would respond with a milder version of their biological weapon. Such as a more annoying version of the common cold." I rolled my eyes.
"How does the air force plan on tricking him into supporting the development of new aircraft when he was adamant that combat aircraft were obsolete?" Visha asked.
"They successfully argued that the CSR only needs a few mages or bombers to survive the initial nuclear strikes to unleash their biological weapons. Their proposal was to have a nuclear tipped anti-air missile to be launched from an aircraft to wipe out a bomber or mage formation with a single strike. The guidance system would use radar to paint the target for the missile to ride the beam. The fundamental drawback of that system is that it is less accurate as the missile approaches the target, but by the time the aircraft disengages, the missile would be close enough to the target to make evasion impossible. The jet would then use its maneuverability to make a 180 degree turn after launching the missile and burn at high speed to avoid being destroyed by its own weapon."
"Remove the nuclear warhead and you have a normal fighter jet." I laughed. "And he actually fell for that?"
"Considering that he is very supportive of that project, I'd say yes." Elya smiled back. "That reminds me, the navy also appears to have caught onto that idea and is trying to pitch the idea of having a nuclear powered aircraft carrier to support a nuclear-armed jet, and the destroyers being able to fire nuclear tipped guided missiles. Remove the nuclear weapons and it goes back to being a conventional force."
"What about the mages?" Visha asked.
"Dr. Schugel has abandoned his work on the Type 100 orb and is now working with physicist Herbert Mataré to develop an orb that has solid state components in it. The Fairchild-Rosenvelt-Degurechaff Semiconductors provided prototype transistors for the two men to work with with the promise of commercially launching the transistors in a few years. The BND has been contributing significantly to the Transistor Orb project and FRD Semiconductors with the prospect of more advanced stealth casting, especially with the military's R&D being hamstrung by President Paul's heavy nuclear focus."
"Huh, that would explain where the FRD's first commercially available transistors are going to." I tapped on my chin. "Thankfully I'm not a government employee so there is no conflict of interest."
Elya smiled a little. "Anna mentioned that your investment in the startup FRD Semiconductors had caused a bitter dispute between the BND and the State Investment Ministry."
Now I'm curious as to why I might have accidentally caused a conflict within the Germanian government.
"The entire staff under Shockley was ready to revolt against him." I shrugged. "It's not my problem that Shockley couldn't figure out how to avoid angering all of his employees."
"According to Anna, the State Investment Ministry was convinced that Shockley was the right person to support and criticized the BND for 'sitting idly by', claiming that you had instigated the company rebellion. The State Investment Ministry's opinion is completely wrong, but that was still a headache for me to deal with."
"With all of these tech developments, I wouldn't be surprised if the communists are trying to at least get a peek at what Germania is doing." Visha said.
Elya froze for a few seconds. That doesn't look good.
"We did have an intel breach with the navy."
"Intel breach?" Visha asked.
"The navy initially couldn't figure out how to get a sufficiently high acceleration out of the jet engines for carrier landing operations, so they were using two jet engines to power a dual propeller design and tried to design the propellers to allow the plane to go 1000 kilometers per hour. They wanted the acceleration of a propeller driven plane and the speed of a jet plane. They gave up when they realized there was no way they could solve the problem with the constant sonic booms coming from the propellers and all of the vibration issues with just running the propellers, engines and gearboxes by themselves. It was not uncommon for the mounts to crack when running the propulsion system close to the maximum speed."
Elya sighed. "And that was when the classic security risk occurred. An alcoholic engineer with a gambling debt and marriage problems. He slipped through the cracks because he was such a highly competent engineer and his coworkers 'didn't want to cause any trouble' for him."
"He sold the design to the communists?"
"Just the propeller and gearbox designs before we caught him. He believed there was no way to resolve the design problems and thought he could scam the Rus."
"Could the communists still build a plane that matches our jets?"
"Depends on how far they are with their engine technology. They might be able to match the speed of our first generation jets if they are able to resolve the propeller design problem."
"Eh, I wouldn't worry about it too much." I chuckled. "What are they going to do, strap a mage into it and hope for the best?"
1951, November 8th, at the old orphanage outside of Berun:
As Visha and I touched down on the ground after flying instead of trying to take a taxi all the way out here, I could see that not much has changed at the orphanage other than the fruits and vegetables they harvested in the fields that I helped clear for them about two decades ago at this point.
"How does it feel to be back here?" Visha softly asked as I looked at the letter again. The orphanage had tried to contact us about Sister Margaret passing away, but we were touring the world at the time.
"Many memories here, that's for certain." I remarked as a group of children came wandering over to us.
As Visha chatted with a few of them, I took a look around the place when a nun came walking towards me.
"Good morning! I apologize for missing Sister Margaret's funeral." I said.
The nun smiled softly, "It is good to see you visit though Chancellor."
"Former Chancellor. Anyways, how is the orphanage?"
"We had a large number of orphans during the war several years ago, but it's doing better now."
Right. Dead husband means a single mother has to take care of their children, and single parenting has been hard to do even in the 21st century. I suppose I could have a TV episode putting forward the idea of modern child welfare.
"Could we pay Sister Margaret's grave a visit?"
"Of course! Follow me." the nun seemed to brighten slightly as she replied. Visha followed us as well, all the while still continuing to play with the children that were tailing us.
When we arrived at Sister Margaret's gravestone, I noticed a few other ones next to it as well. And Visha had brushed off the children when she saw the gravestones.
"What happened there?" I asked.
"About a year ago, there was an accident." the nun softly spoke. "A few children were playing in the road when a car came around a corner at high speed. The ambulance didn't arrive until much later, and they were not equipped to treat the children. Sister Margaret took those losses hard and she passed away only several weeks later, so we buried her with them."
I felt a rush of mixed emotions. Guilt, mostly – despite knowing that I couldn't have been there for the children, nor for the woman who had given her all to try and keep us all fed in hard times. Sister Margaret and the rest of the nuns of the orphanage had invested so much into raising good future members of society, only to have their lives snuffed out by a careless accident.
Perhaps there was something I could've done while I was in office? Oh, who am I kidding – there definitely was a way, it's just that the job had the way of fixing your eyes on the bigger picture. Perhaps I should be more politically active. Not go back into running the government and dealing with the stress. No, just rallying support to get something done; Improve road safety, medical care, and welfare aimed towards the orphaned children whose lives would've been wasted otherwise… Those kids could have been the next great scientist, engineer, artist, or philosopher.
I felt wetness in my cheeks, and I then blinked before raising a sleeve to wipe off the tears once I realized that I was crying, which I can't show. Vulnerability is what gets you ripped apart in business, war, and politics. Actions to solve a problem are what people want to see. I need to focus on what to do in the future instead of dwelling on what has already happened, and can't change.
"Tanya, are you okay? I don't think I've seen you this… angry, in a while." Visha nudged my shoulders, confusing me for a moment.
Huh? Ah, I realized I was frowning too hard and overcompensated
Visha came closer and put an arm around me, and we both stood in silence for a long while as I thought of how . "They didn't have to go like this…" I eventually muttered out, and then turned towards the nun who had kept a respectable distance away. "I'm sorry for your loss, sister. But I swear I'll do what I can to prevent any more of this from ever happening again.
1951, December 3rd, Londinium:
Prime Minister Richard William's knuckles turned white as he watched the television, almost considering throwing his glass of scotch at the screen. A knock on the door was heard.
"Enter."
Allen Shone stepped in and quickly took notice of the talk show.
"Ah, how are you liking that Germanian talk show?" Shone smiled.
"One thing for certain, she's making a mockery of us with our refusal to allow Germania to build more submarines and how our attempted Alsace-Lorraine referendum fixing was exposed after the secret naval treaty renegotiation deal fell through. Besides, President Paul's claims of the Chinese building their own submarines is just a poor excuse for the Germanian Navy to go back to threatening our interests, and they probably improved their high speed submarine technology all of these years to begin mass production. He knows that is our red line."
"It seems that she's using everyone as a punching bag, and much of it is also directed at President Paul. Have you ever considered that she might be campaigning again for office?"
"What?" William blankly looked at Shone.
"She's very good with words and persuading people to do things, just as competent and vicious as her combat performance. She completely outplayed me in the start of the Bharatian War when I thought that maybe, just maybe she was actually just wanting to contain the communists. And then she stole half of the bloody sub-continent after previously reassuring me that she had no interest in having a colony in Bharat. And not too long ago, she had a talk show about 'saving the kids' or something along those lines to make people think that she's a sweetheart. Machiavelli would be proud of her."
William continued staring at the television. "Now that I'm thinking about it, who could stop her from becoming a Chancellor-President again?"
"That has been bothering me. You and I know that Germania's current President is unpopular at home. Maybe he could have pulled some shenanigans and technicalities to ensure that he wins next year's election, but not with the Devil of the Rhine back home, who could outdo him in that game if she chooses to play dirty. Or just whip up the populace and military to conduct massive protests to overthrow him."
"Is there no one else?" William asked before taking a drink.
"Not after the Germanian President also ensured the destruction of the major political parties to weaken their parliament. It's perfect timing for her." Shone sighed. "The bloody idiot cleared a path for her return to power. I don't know if he actually thought that she would never come back to politics, or if he's just an agent for her."
"And even if she is elected again, we still have to work with her to contain the communists. I know we're making some progress in the Malayan Emergency, but if it wasn't for the Malayan rebels, we wouldn't have lost Aegyptus and maybe stabilize the situation in Burma."
"Speaking of the communists, the CSR sent a diplomat on a surprise visit. They wanted to negotiate a deal." Shone rubbed his chin.
"Were there any advance notice of their arrival?" Williams suddenly sat upright and put aside his drink. "Or something to indicate what they want to discuss?"
"No advanced notice. He handed us a letter asking for a sensitive discussion on 'global politics', that there will be a mage from both sides running a privacy spell in a secure room, and no papers will be kept after the meeting."
Williams continued staring at the television.
"Tell me, which one would be worse, a world dominated by her, or a world where she and the communists remained locked in eternal struggle?"
"You're telling me to invite the communist diplomat for dinner?" Shone raised an eyebrow.
"I would like to hear their proposition if they're trying to be secret about it." Williams responded as he turned off the television. "Seems like whatever they had in mind, they don't want anyone else to find out. Maybe even their allies."
"I'll make the preparations. Also, have you seen the report about Aegyptus's recent activities?"
Williams frowned. "I have. They're seeking to buy materiel to expand their military, including tanks, artillery and aircraft, from the Unified States and Germania. One of them has been officially neutral in this whole mess, but they might be tempted to sell materiel if the Aegyptians offer a high enough price if they're confident that the Suez Canal will remain open. The other one has reasons to interfere with us now that they're bent on building submarines. I find it troubling that the Germanians have taken a neutral stance on the situation. The only public thing they stated was that the Suez Canal situation was something that the Albish and Aegyptians would have to peacefully resolve, and that Germania had no business with the Middle East."
"The Aegyptians suspect that our allies and Francois Republic's allies bordering them might plan on invading them to end their independence. It didn't help that the Kingdom of Tripoli's monarchy also criticized the Aegyptian revolution, although our intel suggests that Tripoli doesn't intend to build up their military themselves unless Aegyptus threatens them."
"Should we have our allies invade them before the Aegyptians are able to build up their military?"
"I would prefer to focus on ensuring that they don't get the materiel in the first place so they can't build up their military to spread their pan-Arab revolutionary ideas that their new president, Izz al-Arab Nassar, has been non-stop talking about using the local press and radio channels."
1952, January 9th, Hambruck:
Just when I hung up the phone after a journalist called to ask if they could schedule an interview with me, the front door opened and Visha stepped into our apartment with groceries. She was still continuing with writing cookbooks.
I then heard some rustling, what sounded to be a letter being opened, and a few minutes paused before she stepped into the living room where I was writing a script for the next talk show episode.
Something on her face indicated that it wasn't a routine grocery run though.
"Someone placed an envelope in my grocery bag and told me to only open it when I get back home."
"Well, if it was a bomb, it would have gone off by now right?" I chuckled, but quickly quieted down when her face didn't shift.
"It's worse than a bomb." was Visha's response as she offered me the envelope. It had some papers and photos in it. I walked over and grabbed it to look through it.
…
Fuck.
It was worse than a bomb going off.
A nuclear reactor went off like a bomb! At least it involved a reactor with the full containment instead of the cheaper zero-containment reactors that President Paul had been pushing for.
"The control rods were sticking so to manually bypass the control rod controls, they were deadlifting them to move them up, and hitting them with a sledgehammer to unstick them before putting them back into automatic controls." Visha sighed. "I'm not a technical expert on nuclear power, but those workarounds seemed dangerous."
I continued reading through the letter, with my hands starting to tremble. "And this accident only happened because a set of the control rods were so stuck that they resorted to using an overhead crane to try to pull them up. It worked, way too well."
Visha shook her head in disbelief. "They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
"From 30% reactor power to over three times the max rated power in the span of half a second before the power reading meter stopped working. And someone claimed they saw a glimpse of the reactor lid steel blocks jumping up and down as they were shutting the first door of the airlock to escape" I groaned.
I looked at the next page, and it was not the only reactor affected. All of the power plants using the similar reactor design had the sticking control rods issue, primarily with the ones that had been operating longer, so the newer reactors with no containment structure would eventually also have the same problems.
There were some investigations and testings to replicate the sticking issues and to come up with a solution, but it was very apparent that producing fuel for nuclear weapons was a high priority.
I flipped through the rest of the content. Some photographs of what was left of the exploded reactor, the interior of the containment shell pulverized from containing the blast with what appeared to be the remains of the control rods stuck in the ceiling, two different Geiger counters outside indicating normal background radiation and thus no signs of a containment failure, a degraded components that were pulled from other reactors that might have contributed to the control rod sticking issue, and so on. Then I saw a memo in the back.
It was from President Paul with a set of instructions to his subordinates. Stop all reactor constructions, shut down reactors except for ones that are known to be absolutely safe, retrain all of the power plant employees on safety, keep Captain Rickover focused on the water cooled naval reactor designs, and avoid panicking the public by suppressing the news of the accident.
"I think someone just handed us a bunch of firebombs, and instructions of where to throw them at." I smirked. "Makes me wonder how much weapon grade nuclear fuel Paul is sitting on."
"How do you think President Paul would react if we went public with this?" Visha asked with a tone of concern.
"I'm interested to see why he specifically mentioned Captain Rickover as one of those people to be kept in the dark about the reactor problems."
AN:
wiki/History_of_the_ambulance#Move_to_on-scene_care
wiki/Emergency_medical_services#Motorization
wiki/Cardiopulmonary_resuscitation#History
wiki/Defibrillation#History
wiki/SL-1#Cause
At SL-1, control rods would get stuck in the control rod channel sporadically. Numerous procedures were conducted to evaluate control rods to ensure they were operating properly. There were rod drop tests and scram tests of each rod, in addition to periodic rod exercising and rod withdrawals for normal operation. From February 1959 to November 18, 1960, there were 40 cases of a stuck control rod for scram and rod drop tests and about a 2.5% failure rate. From November 18 to December 23, 1960, there was a dramatic increase in stuck rods, with 23 in that time period and a 13.0% failure rate. Besides these test failures, there were an additional 21 rod-sticking incidents from February 1959 to December 1960; four of these had occurred in the last month of operation during routine rod withdrawal.
…
The accident caused SL-1's design to be abandoned and future reactors to be designed so that a single control rod removal would not have the ability to produce very large excess reactivity. Today this is known as the "one stuck rod" criterion and requires complete shutdown capability even with the most reactive rod stuck in the fully withdrawn position. The documentation and procedures required for operating nuclear reactors expanded substantially, becoming far more formal as procedures that had previously taken two pages expanded to hundreds. Radiation meters were changed to allow higher ranges for emergency response activities.
The writing was also inspired by the Windscale Piles fire, where the filters were previously thought to be unneeded and mocked as "Cockcroft's Folly":
wiki/John_Cockcroft#Cockcroft's_Folly
Nuclear submarine performance: wiki/USS_Nautilus_(SSN-571)
From 1955 to 1957, Nautilus continued to be used to investigate the effects of increased submerged speeds and endurance. The improvements rendered the progress made in anti-submarine warfare during World War II virtually obsolete. Radar and anti-submarine aircraft, which had proved crucial in defeating submarines during the war, proved ineffective against a vessel able to move quickly out of an area, change depth quickly and stay submerged for very long periods.[18]
Nuclear landmines: wiki/Atomic_demolition_munition
Nuclear man-portable rockets: wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
How the early missiles were guided by radar: wiki/Beam_riding
Nuclear air-to-air rocket: wiki/AIR-2_Genie
The "acceleration of a propeller driven plane and the speed of a jet plane" plane design:
watch?v=GIGlQBx4tys
wiki/Republic_XF-84H_Thunderscreech
The shock wave was actually powerful enough to knock a man down; an unfortunate crew chief who was inside a nearby C-47 was severely incapacitated during a 30-minute ground run.[17] Coupled with the already considerable noise from the subsonic aspect of the propeller and the T40's dual turbine sections, the aircraft was notorious for inducing severe nausea and headaches among ground crews.[11] In one report, a Republic engineer suffered a seizure after close range exposure to the shock waves emanating from a powered-up XF-84H.[18]
The pervasive noise also severely disrupted operations in the Edwards AFB control tower by risking vibration damage to sensitive components and forcing air traffic personnel to communicate with the XF-84H's crew on the flight line by light signals.
Inspiration for the dual propellers on the Germanian prototype plane:
wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95
The Tu-95 is one of the loudest military aircraft, particularly because the tips of the propeller blades move faster than the speed of sound.[2]
Reference to Aegyptus's revolution:
wiki/Gamal_Abdel_Nasser
wiki/Pan-Arabism#Attempts_at_Arab_union