Leigh Kimmel says:

Nicholas Yates seldom gives interviews, so I was surprised when he invited me to speak with him, not at his laboratory, but at his North Shore home. He proved surprisingly personable, and we chatted for some time about his various inventions. The Picker was obvious, given that it was the final wedge that broke the power of the Southern planter aristocracy. But the Bombsight was also critical, given how it compensated for the change in buoyancy caused by the bomb’s release, so that strikes could be targeted in rapid succession.

From there our conversation drifted to the Turkish War itself. He’d personally commanded the airship USNS Abraham Lincoln in the latter part of the War, as US forces were hunting the worst of the criminals involved in the massacres of Christians and Jews in the Carpathians. I was already cognizant of the atrocities of the latter part of the War, so I did not probe for details. Instead, I asked how he, a good Irish son of the Catholic Church, felt about defending the various Orthodox Churches of the Balkans.

Yates gave an awkward little laugh. “I’m not sure how well the label ‘good Catholic’ applies to me, not when the Holy Father effectively called for the Turkish War to be made into a new Crusade. Personally, I think the wisest thing America’s leadership did was to specifically refuse to make it a war about religion.” He paused, frowned. “You do know I’m a survivor of the Great Hunger — what the sassenach call the Irish Potato Famine. I probably would be an indifferent Catholic at best if the British Crown hadn’t made religion such an issue. ‘Want relief? Renounce the Catholic Church’ — that’s what they told us. That’s the reason why I felt so much joy in renouncing all allegiance to Queen Victoria. And I expect America’s refusal to make religion an issue is part of why missionaries of all stripes are finding so much interest in the Gospel in that land.”