Y-12 National Security Complex

You're like, "So this is really bad, right?"

Yeah, and my mom, um, worked for Y-12 her whole career, and was like, "Those bombs put food on the table." And she did say at the time, uh, we dismantle them now, so, you know.

[laughs]

I don't know if you need to take that out of the interview, but.

refining the uranium that ended the war and birthed the atomic age.

During the dawn of the Cold War, this 60,000 acre complex, encompassing the massive K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, the Y-12 electromagnetic facility, and the X-10 graphite reactor, held the absolute crown jewels of the United States nuclear arsenal.

Now because of that, it was the most heavily defended patch of real estate on the planet.

The airspace overhead, designated prohibited area P-48, was an absolute dead zone.

Kenneth Arnold had just made his historic sighting over Mount Rainier, and rumors of flying disks were sweeping the nation.

The public laughed at office post-war hysteria, but inside Oak Ridge, the mood turned razor sharp when the sentries began logging physical breaches.

In July and August of 1947, armed AEC security patrols stationed along the high security perimeters of Y-12 watched silent, disc-shaped craft drift slowly over the ridges.

They didn't roar like propeller planes.

So the NNSA announced that it had inked a new memorandum of understanding with the Pentagon, specifically the Pentagon's Joint Interagency Task Force 401. to strengthen collaboration and information sharing on efforts to counter threats posed by unmanned aircraft systems, particularly emerging drone threats by non-state actors and potentially great power rivals, Iran, Russia, China, to critical U.S. national security infrastructure.

So this caught my eye because it suggests that the U.S. military is going to have a larger role footprint, so to speak, in providing counter drone security at NNSA facilities, such as perhaps the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

I digress on that for now.

Ben, one last thing, though, on my radar was that the last remaining American troops in Iraq pulled out of Erbil Air Base in Kurdistan on September 30, more than two decades after the 2003 invasion toppled The regime of Saddam Hussein, which later morphed into the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State terrorist group.

Bangor, Washington is a submarine base.

Warheads cycle between Pantex and the weapons labs, Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, plus the Kansas City National Security Campus and Y-12 at Oak Ridge and the military bases.

That's the convoy Daniel saw.

That's the convoy.

We're the largest employer in East Tennessee.

So the Y-12 plant is all part of what I do, but so is Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia, the Nevada test site, etc.

So nsa has 70 000 employees and contractors another 50 000 um subcontract subcontractors across the nation we make nuclear weapons and maintain them we also provide for the nuclear propulsion for our submarines and aircraft carriers and we make sure that nuclear material stays out of the hands of bad people so That brings up a whole

lot of stuff.

Glad to be here.

Thank you.

Before we get to Iran, Y-12.

What is Y-12? What do they do? And tell me some of the exciting and good things the folks out there are doing.