I’ve been to the place where the world ends. It’s in an out of the way spot, far to the north, near a beaver dam and an abandoned air force base that most people have forgotten even existed. A wildlife refuge surrounds this strange little grotto of man-made hillocks that abides there quietly, a vestige of a time that all too unfortunately has not yet passed from our world. Days go by and no human visits. I walked there with my brother and we moved amid the bunkers, squat tomb-like structures built to withstand a nuclear blast unbothered by anyone or anything but a lonely crow flying over the barest whisper of a breeze. If I didn’t know better, I could swear I heard someone say something there, something like a prayer. Perhaps that person was me. I grew up about fifteen miles away from this place and for the entirety of my life in my hometown of Caribou, Maine, I knew that the military had nuclear weapons nearby. After all, it was the middle of the Cold War. Loring Air Force Base was even mentioned in the movie ‘Wargames’, a film I watched at the local Caribou Theater. In it, a nervous airman answers the call - if the Russians launched an all-out nuclear attack on the United States, Loring would be the first target. Yes, I knew we had bombs. But walking among the bunkers where the nation’s first batch of bombs waited in readiness to destroy life on Earth, it brought all that fear and helplessness back to me. It reminded me that I had grown up on the edge of oblivion. We all did.  The former site of the North River Depot is in Limestone, Maine. It was built here before the nearby Loring Air Force Base, which itself is now only a memory. The bunkers we walk among are easily viewed on Google Earth but at one time in the early 1950s, this was one of the most secure and secret sites on the planet. Inside this strange and haunting set of structures half buried in the earth, the United States stored enough nuclear warheads to destroy the earth several times over. These are the depositories of doom and they are as quiet as the grave. They stand today as a testament to a period of time in our history when the words ‘the end of the world’ were no longer a metaphor. This was the place where the end of the world could easily have begun. In the aftermath of World War II, for a while, the United States was the sole superpower on the planet. Two nuclear fission bombs had been dropped on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan, ending the greatest war this planet and humanity had ever known. The United States had only two bombs at the time and both were used, with the threat that we had many more at our disposal if the need arose to bomb the country of Japan into submission. When the Emperor of Japan signed the documents ending the war, the United States had no nuclear weapons left. The tactic worked. The arsenal was actually empty, but not for long. Armed with the recipe, the building of bombs began in earnest and with the true start of the military industrial complex came the need for a place to store these weapons, a place where no one would even think to look. IF you’re going to stockpile something above top secret, you’d better find someplace no one would ever think of looking. In 1947, a new joint service military organization called the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project began its task of assessing the readiness of the nuclear weapons possessed by the U.S. government. When they got to Los Alamos, they discovered that there were, in fact, no new nuclear weapons to assess. Since the end of World War II, not a single nuclear bomb had been constructed. By the time the inspectors left Los Alamos, there was one bomb that t thought capable of detonation. The Special Weapons project set up shop in neighboring Sandia Base in New Mexico in that same year, which was also the year that the Truman Doctrine became US policy - a doctrine that offered to ‘support free peoples who are resisting attempted subj