Following the founding of Blackburn, the Blackburn Centre for Energy Studies (BCES) was built under the guise of a commercial power plant to produce power for the region. This was the headquarters of Project LIBERTY, a subproject of Project GREYMAN assigned the following missions:
- To design and manufacture commercially viable nuclear reactors for civilian use, alongside Nuclear Fuel.
- To experiment with nuclear miniaturisation.
- To test and fabricate atomic weapons.
- To study and experiment with Uranium-259, the so-called “Warpstone”.
In 1955, the BCES successfully detonated a Gun-Type Atom Bomb and began mass-producing this design. Unfortunately, poor security controls resulted in a number of these warheads going missing and knowledge of nuclear production spreading. Security was enormously improved afterwards, and further leaks were stopped in time.
But perhaps Project LIBERTY’s greatest breakthrough came in 1957, when the first viable Microfission Cell was successfully tested. It was a canister roughly the size and weight of a propane tank, capable of powering an entire house for years. The MFIC was one of Oceanyka’s most closely guarded secrets, even after Blackburn was abandoned a year later, and only came to the attention of the outside world in late 1961, when Alan Redfort authorised the transferring of MFIC technology to The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in exchange for military technology and hardware. A few months later, ACME Atomic Industries was founded, partially with Soviet money owed from the MFIC transfer.
In 1958, there was a catastrophic meltdown at the Warpstone Research Reactor (WRR), irradiating much of the zone and spreading chunks of “active” U-259. Blackburn was abandoned in lieu of the strange mutations which its inhabitants, as well as the local flora and fauna, began to experience. A trend of paranormal incidents began to emerge. Project LIBERTY was relocated to a smaller facility near Cestlep and all warpstone research was banned. The incident generated much international interest. Publicly, it was covered up as a regular nuclear meltdown. Earth’s superpowers, however, got wind of the effects U-259 had on the environment and raced to study this new substance. The first nation to experiment with warp-bombs was The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which in 1961 detonated a hydrogen bomb containing a warpstone core: the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba.
When the Oceanykan Revolution occurred, much of Project LIBERTY’s personnel defected to the Australian Emergency Committee, but a significant portion remained loyal to the Department of Energy from which they hailed. Everything regarding nuclear power production and atomic weapons remains in the government’s power, as does a significant portion of warpstone research data and the science behind MFIC technology.