Fat Man: Name of the plutonium bomb that, on August 9, 1945, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. By the end of the year more than 70,000 people had died from its results. During the following five years 140,000 more people died, and the count continues to this day.

homunculus: The alchemists "imagine that a dead living being could be restored, at least in a smokelike image, if they carefully collected all its parts, triturated them and treated the composition in a vessel with the proper fire." (Silberer,1971)

never before seen: "Plutonium was the first man-made element produced in a quantity large enough to see." (McPhee,1977)

smokes: "Fifteen seconds after the nuclear device (at Trinity Site) flashed, Ted (Taylor) reached down to the parabolic mirror beside him and took from behind it a smoldering Pall Mall. He drew in a long pleasing draught of smoke. He had lit a cigarette with an atomic bomb." (Ibid.)

safe-secure trailer: These "SST"s hold up to three TRUPACT-II (TRU=transuranic) containers, made by Nuclear Packaging Inc. in Carlsbad, NM, at a cost of $200,000 each. Each TRUPACT holds up to fourteen 55 gallon drums of combustible trash and transurainc waste. In August 1989 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved TRUPACT-II for hauling nuclear waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) 26 miles southeast of Carlsbad from temporary storage sites around the country. (Shortly after NRC approval 74 welding defects to the containers were identified.)

window: "We are given the opportunity to discover that the bomb, for example, is a way of seeing, that it is not just an event in our world but also, and more fundamentally, the incarnation of an attitude or disposition toward the world, a way in which we have practiced being a self with distant vision behind a window." (Romanyshyn,1989)

mirror: "There is glass in the window and in the mirror, but in the mirror the glass is covered with a little silver; now lo and behold, no sooner is a little silver added than you cease to see others and see only yourself." (Ansky,1972)

MAD: "All roads in the strategic equation lead to MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction). All the other...are games, and window dressing...But when you take away all these layers of cloth, at the bottom of the thing, basically, is MAD, and no one likes it." (Kull,1988)

containment: "The buzz word for American policy was 'containment.' a term synonymous with George Kennen, who wrote (in) a seminal paper...'The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.' (Foreign Affairs, July 1947) He has since reproached himself for the containment paper, because he thinks it was misunderstood." (Newhouse,1989)

Don't Breathe: "You could hold an ingot of plutonium next to your heart or brain, fearing no consequences. But you can't breathe it. A thousandth of a gram of plutonium taken into the lungs as invisible specks of dust will kill anyone--a death from massive fibrosis of the lungs in a matter of hours, or at least at most a few days." (McPhee,1977)