Growing Up in "404 Not Found" (Part II): The Vanishing Nuclear City

14 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by Vincent_Yan404
(vincent404.substack.com)

10 Comments

WarOnPrivacy

12 hours ago

I can relate with odd bits of this story. I grew up in a rural town during the time when it's Nike missile base was being decommissioned. The base was constructed on penitentiary property and those cold war buildings were taken over by the prison. This was the setting for my boyhood. Endless places for exploring and mischief.

I went back after 2 decades and find the entire area was unrecognizably transformed. The prison moved and most of the area was developed. The town was renamed to distance itself from it's past. Forests were developed into McMansions while some century old fields became forests. The paved road I'd walked thousands of times (connected to our dirt road) was rerouted. It was a super disorienting experience.

Vincent_Yan404

12 hours ago

Thank you for sharing that. Our hometowns were built as means to an end—political or military missions—rather than places meant to last for people. To us, it was our entire world; to the state, it was just a tool. That’s why our personal memories and that sense of disorientation are never truly valued by the powers that be. We are left to wander the ruins of a history that has already moved on.

avhception

11 hours ago

Interesting, that's a point of view that I didn't consider so far. Growing up in Europe, even the local church often dates back quite a few centuries. My small hometown has residential buildings that are multiple centuries old, still inhabited today. The town itself dates back to 1072. The attitude towards the buildings and history is very different here.

netsharc

8 hours ago

But there are also hometowns of the mind that disappear, e.g. someone who grew up in East Germany would lament that the cartoons and foods they grew up with no longer exists...

avhception

3 hours ago

As a "West-German", I'd argue that's also true over here. The 80s and 90s are gone. I even sometimes use the construct "Bonner Republik" to refer to the time before unification.

Vincent_Yan404

12 hours ago

I promised a few people yesterday I’d share Part II today.

First, thank you to Tom (Moderator) and this community for the incredible reception of Part I.

My English writing is still limited (IELTS 6.0), so Part II is also a sentence-by-sentence AI translation. This is an extended version. I added a bit more details that weren't in my original Chinese posts.

Here is the original Chinese version I wrote https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111. You can see the raw narrative before it was translated.

Thank you for reading a story from a non-native speaker trying to bridge the gap with tools.

WarOnPrivacy

12 hours ago

The nuclear materials made in 404, were those used to construct the weapons tested at Lop Nor?

(for HN: Lop Nor/Nur is China's atomic testing area. The final atmospheric test (by anyone) was conducted there. Oct 1979 if memory serves)

Vincent_Yan404

12 hours ago

As far as I know, yes. The most critical component—the Uranium-235 core—was finished in 404. In Part I, I mentioned a legendary machinist named Yuan Gongpu. He was tasked with the final precision turning of the core on a lathe.

It’s famously known as the 'Final Three Cuts.' Because the material was so rare and the stakes so high, he had to complete the final shaping in three extremely delicate stages. He achieved a precision of 0.001mm (often described as 1/80th of a human hair) entirely by hand. This earned him the nickname 'Yuan the Three-Cuts' (Yuan Sandao) in our hometown history