Matt Shay sat in his cubbyhole in a concrete space about the size of a basketball court, somewhere under the gypsum hills of southern New Mexico. This operation was called the Pocket. There were people here who weren’t sure whether they were doing weapons work. They were involved in exploratory research and didn’t know exactly what happened to their findings, their simulations, the results they discovered or predicted. This is one of the underlying themes of the systems business, where all the work connects at levels and geographic points far removed from the desk toil and lab projects of the researchers. Matt used to do consequence analysis, figuring out the lurid mathematics of a nuclear accident or limited exchange. He worked with data from real events. There was the thing that fell to earth on Albuquerque in 1957, a thermonuclear bomb of jumbo tonnage mistakenly released from a B-36—nobody’s perfect, okay—and landing in a field within the city limits. The conventional explosives detonated, the nuclear package did not.
