Amid all of this messy thinking we miss the simple truth behind our material wealth: It has been achieved through the accumulation, by us and inherited from our forefathers, of a stock of highly configured and embedded tools that make human effort more effective and things possible that never were before.
The third mistake was that, because the workers were allowed to bypass the time-consuming mixing process in the tower, with its automatic controls for preventing such things happening, they were free to dump their material into a vessel that was not designed to prevent the accumulation of a critical mass sufficient to support a chain reaction.
The order invoked the authority, inter alia, of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701-1706) and declared a national emergency to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the risk of nuclear proliferation created by the accumulation of a large volume of weapons-usable fissile material in the territory of the Russian Federation.