Do Cruise Missiles Ever Need a Jump-Start?

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Do Cruise Missiles Ever Need a Jump-Start?

A driver’s new car would not start, so three of us innocent bystanders formed a committee to make it go.  We moved another car close, broke out the old jumper cables, lifted the hood of the new but dysfunctional car, and -- and stared at the innards in some confusion.

What does a car battery look like in these progressive times?

We were faced with scattered layers of grey plastic covers that didn’t seem to form any sort of identifiable pattern.  A young man, whom we elders thought might know more about designer batteries, joined the party, and he too considered the assemblage to be a great mystery.  One of the committee, scientifically-trained, finally found a small, protruding piece of metal marked with an X or a +, depending on how you looked at it, and suggested that it might be a battery terminal.

So the committee connected positive to positive and negative to frame, and the driver started her car, blessed us, and motored happily off into the sun rising over a new lath-and-plaster garbage-in-your-fuel-tank station.

O listen, my children: once upon a time, when giants roamed the earth, one looked into the engine compartment of an automobile and saw an engine.  Carburetor, distributer, wires, spark plugs, hoses, belts, radiator, and other mechanical devices were clearly discernible. 

In our time, very-serious-people-with-clean-hands-who-do-thinky-stuff-in-offices have commanded that the engine compartments of cars be stuffed with a potpourri of delicate and mysterious boxes, black boxes, re-breathers, re-cyclers, cleaners, exchangers, wheezers, whoozers, sublimators, terminators, verminators, activators, de-activators, catalytic does-this-really-do-anything-erters, pentameters, stanzas, quatrains, refrains, caesurae, end-stops, and a buzzard in a pear tree. 

Entombed within all these thingies, and powering them, is an internal combustion engine predicated on 19^th-century-technology: gas + air + spark = energy.  There may be a metaphor in all that.

Further, the combustible liquid which the engine employs to carry the car, its passengers and baggage, and the predatory devices clamped to that engine and draining it of energy, is no longer gasoline made from real dinosaurs.  The very-serious-people-with-clean-hands-who-do-thinky-stuff-in-offices have commanded that each tank of propellant must now contain a can or two of field corn.

Internal combustion engines don’t work well on field corn.

If, twenty years ago, a refinery had adulterated its gasoline with corn syrup, trials and jail-time would have followed.  Thanks to the miracle of modern ideology – hardly science – a refinery that now does not clog good ol’ dinosaur juice with compost could face a raid by armed acronyms swarming through the gates.

Much useable energy is wasted in the manufacture, transportation, sale, installation, regulation, inspection, repair, and replacement of all those parasitic thingamabobs burdening each car’s engine.  More useable energy is wasted by the engine having to power all that stuff and drag it around.

Say, what kind of pollution devices are fitted to cruise missiles?  And do they sometimes require a jump-start in order to launch?

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