GENEVA, Switzerland, July 27, 2009 (WSFB International Service) “Since before its startup and almost immediate shutdown in September of last year, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been plagued with technical problems. Now CERN scientists claim that the superweapon’s activation is being obstructed by a network of spies, saboteurs, and “litigious fuckwads.”

Located deep in the Earth’s crust underneath the French-Swiss border, the world’s largest world-destroying device has been offline for repairs during the past 10 months following the catastrophic failure of one of the device’s 1600 superconducting magnets, killing 13, including the media journalist at fault for the failure.

“You don’t dunk a wrench into a magnet’s helium coolant tank just to see if it will shatter when you drop it,” said a CERN press release at the time. “That’s just common sense, or at least all the physicists here thought so.”

Initially, CERN scientists termed the failure a “tragic albeit hilarious accident,” but after a series of increasingly suspicious roadblocks, they have reconsidered.

“First of all there was the demand by the City of Geneva that we cease operations during the winter months so that they can have heat. It’s a ridiculous constraint. They know perfectly well it was their curling iron that caused the 2007 blackout,” CERN spokesman Dark Lord James Gillies told WSFB reporters Friday.

Then, before the scheduled September startup, two lawsuits were filed to stop the launch, claiming the device could create miniature black holes or strangelets that could swallow the planet whole. CERN scientists dismissed the charges as absurd.

“Those cockmonkeys don’t know what they’re talking about. The RHIC in New York creates those [Earth-destroying particles] all the time,” said Dark Lord Gillies. “They just sink quietly to the center of the Earth where they don’t bother anybody. Our mission is to harness that wasted energy and put it to better use.”

As if that wasn’t enough, a March incident in which a saboteur shoved a potato into the beam pipe delayed startup further. “We spent three months cleaning mashed potato out of all 17 miles of pipe,” said Dark Lord Gilles. “Do you know what mashed potato smells like after twelve weeks?”

Most recently, a series of antimatter thefts from the underground facility have left the LHC’s doomsday apparatus, codenamed ATLAS, without fuel. “We thought that storing the antimatter in easy-to-transport 10-kiloton [TNT equivalent] canisters would simplify the loading mechanism,” intoned the Dark Lord. “But it turns out it also makes it very easy to steal.”

Follwing allegations by “some Harvard intellectual” that these thefts were carried out by the Illuminati, scientists have linked the incidents into an orchestrated plot headed by “freelance madmen” intent on keeping the LHC shut down and carrying out planetwide destruction on their own terms.

“We’ve beefed up security considerably since then, and flooded the circular beam track with helium gas to asphyxiate any trespassers. At least we learned that much from the magnet incident,” said Dark Lord Gillies.

“We can’t afford any more delays, because frankly we will never get our demands met if we can’t maintain the fear factor. We’ve already had to push back our ultimatum date into Q4 2012, God forbid we have to push it into 2013.”

“Not that I believe in God,” he quickly added.