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Nucleus

I’m powered, No, not just my mini reactor. I mean I am powerful! Hey, I’m even reactive! I’m alive, I’ve been living longer than my peers. None of that young blood transfused into me to reduce the aging process. I am alive, not just an atomic half-life! Not even sure how I’m really powered. Some might say it’s a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. The sort used in space probes. With its glowing orange core. And the string of lighthouses and beacons along the northern coasts of Russia all to be replaced by wind and solar by 2015.

What a life it’s been. What a curve into the future I’m travelling.

Melded by those two scientists, binary innovation, minds merged in 1953! Seeking to escape the fences of the Cold War, by imagination.

I was born … fantastic!

It’s taken me a long time to acknowledge my siblings. And I mean mammals and machines.

Mammalian, off the coast of Greenland. Traditional fare they are. The sliced delights of dinner. Other mammal feed. But I’m more than that, a strip of tasty flesh.

In the 1960s the Soviet Union developed its nuclear fleet. Silence under the ice. Now that’s the real definition of the Cold War. I’m not of its ideology. But I’m branded by association, I suppose. Able to fathom the depths of the arctic, to pass under the frozen dome pack, not to measure climate conditions as I do now, or to track the melting patterns of sea ice.

What am I doing? Playing in the strategies of the seas? History, geo-politics and Putin’s typically vigorous relaunch of his arctic policy, new icebreakers and deep divers included, charts and territory once again contested. Three new nuclear submarines on combat training. The Borey class, the class of 2015!!

The arctic seas. The underwater landscapes being claimed. And the war of words online, the Barent’s Observer funded by the Norwegians, the global reach of the Russian news channel RT. You gotta read these waters.

I will have to swim inside the tides and across the contested borders, document and describe. There is a new nucleus of power already launched and others will follow, oil and gas, carbonised futures, going up in smoke while I live on and on….

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