ENSEI TANKADO

“Although Ensei Tankado was not alive during the Second World War, he carefully studied everything about it – particularly about its culminating event, the blast in which 100,000 of his countrymen were incinerated by an atomic bomb.”

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“Hiroshima, 8:15 a.m. August 6, 1945 – a vile act of destruction. A senseless display of power by a country that had already won the war.  Tankado had accepted all that. But what he would never accept was that the bomb had robbed him of ever knowing his mother. She had died giving birth to him – complications brought on by the radiation poisoning she suffered so many years earlier.”  Ch. 6

Don: Deception Point features two iterations of Carl Sagan. One, David Becker, is the classic portrayal of the Carl Sagan that we all know and love. That image stands in stark contrast to the Tankado character, born deformed from the womb of a Japanese mother poisoned by an American made atomic bomb.

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Molly: I know that Carl was a global leader in the anti-nuke movement, so, in theory, he could have written the two paragraphs you quote.

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Don: Right, and Carl was Jewish, so the Hitler Holocaust, where six million of his people were ruthlessly annihilated, was never far from his mind. It’s reasonable that Carl would have called Hiroshima “a vile act of destruction.” It’s also true that Carl, as the son of Jewish Russian emigrants, was born “deformed” in the sense that, as a Russian Jew, he would have been flagged early on in his career as a potential security risk by U.S. intelligence agencies. And, if this weren’t enough, Carl was a leader in several protests movements. He was anti-nuke, anti-Vietnam, anti-environmental degradation, anti-misogyny, anti-military/industrial complex, and, perhaps just to piss off the government even more, pro-marijuana!

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Molly: And, I might add, Carl came on the scene at the height of the Cold War, a dark time in American history when Senator Joseph McCarthy was seeing “Commies” behind every rock. It was also a time of national paranoia about aliens. There was Roswell, Area 51, UFO sightings, abductions, mutilations, crop circels -you name it.

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Don: All that is true. Carl, trying to conduct serious science, got tangled up in an alien shit-show. While all this was going on, he maintained regular contact with Russian peers, even attending conferences in Russia related to extraterrestrials.

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Molly: And, remember, the co-author of his famous book Intelligent Life in the Universe, was the high ranking Russian physicist, I.S. Shklovskii.

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Don: It’s also a safe assumption that U.S. intelligence agencies, after Carl published his Direct Contact paper in which he advanced the hypothesis that advanced extraterrestrials visited Earth thousands of times over its geological history, and, more recently, during the biblical era, would have called him in for an off-the-record interrogation. Scientifically brilliant, Carl was considered an important government asset. The Deep State didn’t want him running off the rails early in his career.

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Molly: If that’s the case, then why was he allowed to visit Russia and collaborate with leading Russian scientists?

Don: Good question. My take is that, in exchange for being allowed to pursue his career in science, Carl agreed to be a government agent, where he would glean as much information as he could about Russian military and technology secrets, particularly those involving its nuclear capabilities, and pass them on to the Pentagon.

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Molly: If that’s true, then Carl, a champion of scientific transparency, would have hated the U.S. military/industrial complex even more.

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Don: Right, which explains why, against all scientific logic, he decided to become a science popularizer who wrote numerous best-selling books on science that were targeted to the masses, knowing that it would severely diminish his standing in the snobby scientific community.

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Molly: In his blockbuster 1985 book, Contact, Carl surreptitiously revealed his position on extraterrestrial intelligence. That must have really antagonized the Pentagon.

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Don: In Contact, Carl discreetly paid homage to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), where radio telescopes were deployed to search for alien electronic signal from space, an experiment Carl knew would end in failure. Yet, in the book, Carl has humans travelling through wormholes to paradisiacal places where they meet departed loved ones who, as avatars, enjoy bliss and eternal life.

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Molly: I remember that part from the movie. It must have driven hard core atheist leaders like Richard Dawkins crazy.

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Don: It did, which incentivized them to put together a scheme that, after Carl died, became the New Atheism.

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Molly: So let’s get back to Ensei Tankado. How does he factor in?

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Don: Tankado not only finds it in his heart to forgive the United States for killing his mother and deforming his body, he becomes a cryptographic genius who worked at the National Security Agency helping to develop TRANSLTR, the secret, most advanced computer in the world, capable of listening in on all electronic communications on Earth and easily breaking all security codes.

“A spiked encryption standard would mean the NSA could listen in to anyone, anytime, anywhere.” Ch. 31

Molly: But then Ensei goes rogue.

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Don: Right. After the Deep State broke their promise to him that its research would be transparent, he invented an algorithm that he called Digital Fortress, which he then embedded into TRANSLTR. To the absolute amazement and shock of NSA cryptographers, Digital Fortress was an unbreakable code.

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