Episode 1 on May 21 has provoked a quiet, growing buzz around the web, with several sites suggesting that there is more here than simply my speculation about this possibility.
My crack research team drilled down and couldn't find much beyond obviously politically charged, not-very-well hidden anti-China agendas.
So I asked the team to spend some time last evening chasing down the graphic and map that accompanied the dead tree edition of the May 16, 2008 New York Times, whose page 12 story by William J. Broad discussed the location of China's nuclear weapons plants and facilities, noting that they are close to the quake's epicenter.
Broad wrote, "Nuclear experts said that closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, in rugged hills a two-hour drive west of Mianyang [top], China runs a highly secretive center that houses a prompt-burst reactor. It mimics the rush of speeding subatomic particles that an exploding atom bomb spews out in its first microseconds."
Mysteriously, the graphic and map appear to have vanished from the Times website, for all practical purposes.
Good thing we're not practical around here, what?
Because both appear above.
The map below
accompanied an earlier Times story which appeared on May 12, 2008.
Below,
a shake map of the earthquake.
The concluding paragraphs of Broad's May 16 article:
"North in an even more rugged and inaccessible region, nuclear experts said, China maintains a hidden complex of large tunnels in the side of a mountain where it stores nuclear arms.
"'It’s very close to the epicenter,' said one specialist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because, to the best of his knowledge, the exact location of the secret complex had never been publicly disclosed.
"Dr. Stillman, the former intelligence chief at Los Alamos, said he had immense regard for the Chinese weapons scientists and assumed that many of their nuclear plants had been built to ride out the pounding of an earthquake or other disasters, natural or man-made.
"'All the Chinese I met in the program were really brilliant,' he said. 'So I think they do it the right way. I hope.'"
