That Time A Young Jimmy Carter Helped Stop A Nuclear Disaster

This post marks the one-year anniversary of Rebecca taking in a stray from Canada to write weekly dispatches from up north. (Holds for applause.) One of the challenges is finding news stories Wonkette’s mostly non-Canadian readers might actually give a flying fuck about, and topics are typically determined by whatever is dominating Canuckistan headlines.

An obvious choice to begin the new year was reality TV star and former aspiring prime minister Kevin O’Leary committing open treason by blathering on talk shows about wanting to “start the narrative” with the once and future mad king regarding his ongoing dumb threat/joke about annexing Canada. “I like this idea and at least half of Canadians are interested,” Herr Wunderbar claimed on Fox, despite a recent Angus Reid poll that found only six percent of compatriots shared his enthusiasm. “Nobody wants Trudeau to negotiate this deal … I don’t want him doing it for me, so I’m going to go to Mar-a-Lago.”

The last time I wrote about this captain of industry and alleged first mate of a Cobalt speedboat was back when he was arguing laws against cooking the books shouldn’t apply to the obscenely rich, and more than a few people in the comments section asked why we were giving this smug little prick more oxygen.

Jon Stewart Roasts Shark For Being In Tank

Fair question. This newly minted citizen of the United Arab Emirates keeps being given a platform because people keep giving him a platform, although it should also be pointed out, as we should have learned by now, that ignoring these idiots does not in fact make them go away. Still let’s settle on a nicer time: How about a story about a nice young naval officer who helped prevent a potential Chernobyl-level disaster on North American soil instead? I wrote this before realizing Marcie had already touched on it in what is clearly the best obit of the 39th president.

Rest In Power, Jimmy Carter

Most okay many okay some people are aware of the role the Great Satan’s Mini-Me played during the Iran Hostage Crisis by smuggling out six diplomats using fake Canadian passports, even if they only learned about it from the Ben Affleck movie Argo. (Which I say without judgment as someone who only found out about the 1921 Black Wall Street/Tulsa Massacre from watching Watchmen.) The consensus is stereotypically decent Canucks simply did the right thing for a friend in a time of need, but the truth is the country was already deeply in President Carter’s personal debt. The Canadian Caper was also a way to help repay a solid.

It was December 1952, the Cold War was in full swing, and a nuclear reactor had partially melted down — the world’s first major reactor accident — in a rural Ontario community a two-hour drive from Ottawa. Lt. James Earl Carter Jr., 28, was at the helm of an atomic submarine and tasked with helping to contain the damage as one of the very few people with first-hand knowledge of how the damn things work.

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Here’s the man in his own words on his team’s heroics at Chalk River Laboratories; he was speaking at a friend’s book launch shortly after the Fukushima disaster in 2011:

All of us lately have been watching with a great deal of concern and despair the meltdown of the nuclear reactors in Japan. The same thing happened in Canada. At that time the nuclear program was one of the most secret in the world and I was blessed to be one of the few young naval officers who was privy to those secrets. I worked for Admiral Hyram Rickover and I was in charge of the crew that built the second atomic submarine, the USS Sea Wolf. A very small number of people in the world were qualified to learn the secrets of the inner workings of a nuclear reactor.

When the disaster took place at Chalk River and I was asked to go up there and help dismantle the very highly radioactive core of the reactor and it was a very difficult and potentially dangerous event but it had to been done. We went to Canada on a train. Nobody in the United States knew we were going; nobody in Canada knew we were coming.

We got to that remote area and they had prepared the place for us. We would put on our white suits and all of our protective equipment and we would dash on to a tennis court where an exact replica of the core of the reactor was on the tennis court. We had the proper wrenches, vice-grips and hammers and we would dash on the tennis court and take off as many nuts and bolts as we could and then we would get away and they would put it back together and we would run on the tennis court and do it again until we had it as perfect as human beings possibly can be in doing as much work as possible in 90 seconds. That is all the time we had.

Then we went down below into the reactor room. We dashed on the site there and, in a highly radioactive environment, did our job. I had radioactive urine for six months and I thought I would never have another child but Amy came later. [Emphasis Wonkette.] But it was an indication even in my early life of the remarkably close ties that exist between every Canadian citizen and every citizen in the United States.

Many years later when I was president of the United States — all the way through 1980 — very few events occurred in my White House experience that were so positively emotional and gratifying.

Imagine. This was just seven years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and two years before the crew of the ironically named Japanese tuna trawler Lucky Dragon 5 were poisoned by giant kabooms in the South Pacific. A bunch of guys in beekeeper suits went the full Spock in 90-second intervals not knowing if they would end up dying in agony or looking like one of the mutants from Fallout.

Or, alternately, gain radioactive superpowers, which could be one explanation for how Carter managed to last another decade after being diagnosed with liver cancer at the age of 90.

Just a reminder that virtues such as courage and honor were once considered important when choosing American presidents. Or even mechanical expertise that goes beyond operating a golf cart or a McDonald’s fry machine. Not that the lazy bastard showed up again when the facility had yet another meltdown six years later.

[Angus Reid Institute / Toronto Life / Bluesky]

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