This may be the most frightening picture that I've ever seen.

I have no idea where this picture was taken. I found it on a Russian-language Live Journal site (at least I think the language was Russian - the letters were Cyrillic). So that suggests that this picture was from that part of the world, but then again, it could be Montana.

This picture has an almost hypnotic, hallucinatory effect on me, and I can't really tell why. Remember the scene in Dr. Strangelove where Slim Pickens rides the falling bomb like a bronco? This picture has that same effect on me.

First, there's the utter desolation of the landscape - not a tree in sight, no real greenery to speak of. And there's no people - this is an industrial landscape, not a place for mere humans. And that sky, so bleak, so cold, so unforgiving. . . .

Look closer. Examine that building on the left. Here, let me bring it in a little closer:Who could design a building like that with so little regard for appearance? Who would? And it's as if someone thought, "Gee, the building's a little too cute. Let's tone it down a little with a really bad paint job - a few splashes of various tones of battleship grey, and the rest we'll just leave concrete brown."

What's a building like that for, anyway? I see a pile of dirt in the foreground, plus a rusting 10,000-gallon storage tank and some trailers or bunkers that appear to be missing the glass from their windows. Notice the dump truck is driving past the building - no roads actually go there. It's too forbidding.

Wait! There's a train leaving the building carrying something:Some sort of rocket. Is it a vehicle for a manned space mission? Could be, but the surroundings suggest that it might also be some sort of weapon. Or espionage. I can't conceive of any good use that missile might be put to.

And where is the train taking the missile? The tracks look like they just loop back around in the foreground again, as if anything wouldn't want to be seen coming directly out of that sinister factory, but instead meanders around a bit to escape its terrible gravity.Nothing lives here. No birds, no people, no trees, no animals. The ground is covered with scraps of metal debris. Desolation. This is death. And this death is producing some sort of rocket, and taking it . . . somewhere.

All of this sounds like some sort of Cold War throwback - and it could be. Maybe this is Iran's new nuclear warhead. Maybe its the WMDs finally discovered. Maybe it's a covert US military operation, and maybe that banging at my door is the Secret Service coming in to take me away for posting classified pictures and maybe