Cryrian Defense Forces: Difference between revisions
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Instead, KAMI's efforts centered on the Cryrian Highlands in Älmark which had a wealth of thorium and uranium deposits located on formerly elven lands that had been gradually seized by the Tomorrow Ministry over the past decades. Thorium, at this time, was deemed to have little commercial or military use, while the Highlands' uranium deposits were large but of low-grade and were found in alum shales in the bedrock. As such, mining and processing the ore was more expensive than normal. Negotiations were opened with Älemsi Negdel to potentially access cheaper sources, but these fell through during the First Yeralik Crisis, leaving few alternatives. Beginning in 1957 KAMI's main focus was placed on building experimental reactors and developing methods to utilize the Highlands uranium to meet civilian and military needs. In that same year the state-owned energy provider RG&E publicly launched a new division to explore the development of nuclear energy options and became the public-facing front for these uranium development projects.
KAMI's projects were briefly disrupted by the White November Crisis towards the end of 1957, but subsequently enjoyed a transfer of funding and resources from the Tomorrow Ministry's soon-to-be defunct bioweapons program. By 1958 the Ministry for Defense had privately expressed its support for a more active and concerted nuclear weapons program in the absence of other forms of deterrence, and KAMI was effectively brought under the umbrella of Special Materials Division. Later internal Ministry reports circulated in 1964 emphasized the growing militarization of the Novaran Cold War and the Kingdom's own nonaligned status which prevented it from benefitting from Great Power conventional or nuclear defense guarantees. This opinion had been openly expressed as early as 1962 by Defense Minister Charles Söderholm, and would later appear in official public statements by the Defense Ministry as a whole.
KAMI planned to use heavy water reactors fueled by its low-grade uranium to produce plutonium, and to that end was able to take advantage of Cryria's position as an early producer of heavy water. The Langtrup and Arensla hydroelectric power plants reportedly furnished KAMI with several tons of heavy water in 1958. The first Cryrian reactor was known as A1 and was built in an underground cavern in the Highlands at the end of 1961. A1 was relatively small, and with a thermal power of 1 MW it existed primarily for further research purposes. That same year, uranium extraction in the Highlands finally reached its intended capacity. In 1965, the Special Materials Division reported to the General Staff that Cryria would be able to rapidly assemble a nuclear device once plutonium production began. A second, larger research reactor named A2 began operations in 1966.
==Major Installations==
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