This was of little consequence to Damian Phillips. He had been called by his London office as soon as the news of the Peleliu's sinking hit the trading screens in London. He had the event he was looking for. Now was the time to cover the short yen positions his dealers had built up in the previous month. There was an avalanche of yen for sale. Japan was seen as the big loser out of war between the US and China war that looked to be imminent. The yen had fallen to 152.55 to the dollar and was finding little stability even at those levels. The Bank of England, on behalf of the Bank of Japan, was buying yen for dollars, but to little avail. The Japanese currency had depreciated more than 20 per cent in two days. First China, which had sold little yen in the previous two days, was sitting on paper profits of billion. As the currency fell against the dollar First China's `yen shorts' were reversed.
In the dealing room of the Bank of International Commerce in London it was pandemonium. Dealers were screaming down telephones, some three at once. Patiently, however, Mark Fuller, chief dealer dollar/yen, was contemplating the arrival of all his Christmases at once. Fuller, thirty-two, was the classic London foreign exchange dealer. He had started his life in the City as a delivery boy and graduated to the bank's settlements department. His talent for numbers had been spotted by National Westminster Bank, where he worked for eight years. He had never looked back. He drove a Morgan (green) and lived in Chelmsford in Essex. He had been a seller of the yen all week. No one wanted to hold it. No one, that is, until First China told him to buy all the yen he could up to billion. Fuller had never had an order like it before. He knew First China. For the past month it had been active in the dollar/yen market, especially in the short positions it had accumulated. He watched the screen before him. It showed all the banks making prices in dollar/yen. And, in the jargon of the market, he `hit' them. In three hours he had bought all the yen First China wanted. What he did not fact could not ow was that at an average of.80 General Zhao of Multitechnologies had just made the best part of $210 million.
Oil markets took fright as well. The spot price of Brent Crude — the bell-weather price for over 70 per cent of the world's trade in oil — arched higher and broke through the $40 a barrel barrier. In the futures market, the 160,000 April contracts which First China owned rose higher. First China's oil trader sold into this rally as much of the position he could. By the end of trading he had managed to sell a further 80,000 contracts at a profit to his client of more than $600 million.
The underground control centre of Defence Research Facility 317 had the well-lit antiseptic look of a hospital and the decor to match. A Fujitsu supercomputer was in a room of its own, slightly over-pressurized so that when its door was opened the flow of air was out of, rather than into, the room. In the main control area there were four banks of computers and screens all manned by technicians. On the far wall was a large electronic map of the western Pacific. In addition to the geography of the area, it also identified the position of the Japanese navy, as well as the navies of China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. A digital display was counting the minutes and seconds backwards towards zero.
Defence Research Facility 317 was located on Chichijima, the main island in the Ogasawara group. The islands' original settlers were a polyglot bunch of Americans, English, Welsh, and Polynesians led by Nathaniel Savory of Massachusetts. They arrived on Chichijima in 1830. It was not until 1873 that Japan claimed sovereignty over the islands; the settlers wisely acknowledged their new status immediately by swearing allegiance to the Empire of Japan. Even in 2001 many of the `old islanders' had distinctly European and Polynesian features. It was during the Second World War, however, that the islands' strategic significance was exploited. Chichijima was a major staging area for Japan's invasion of the Marianas, Solomons, Philippines, and points south. Its huge radio facility atop Mount Yoake gave orders to Japan's entire Pacific fleet. One of the islands in the group, Iwo Jima, was the site of some of the most bloody combat the Americans encountered in the spring of 1945 as they edged towards the Japanese mainland. It was not until 1968 that the Ogasawaras were returned to Japan. They were much as Japan had left them. The mountains were honeycombed with tunnels that led to copper-lined suites of rooms. Although they were put under the titular administration of the Ministry of Finance, the Japanese navy — then called the Maritime Self-Defence Force reoccupied the islands. In the 1990s the air force built an airport on Anijima, just across from Chichijima. It was capable of taking the latest fighters and military transport aircraft.
The Japanese are a thrifty race. They waste little. Painstakingly they restored the tunnels and rooms. The copper was removed and recycled and in its place was put steel, lead, and concrete. Accommodation for more than 150 permanent scientists (and up to 60 visitors) was fashioned inside the rock. Electric power and state-of-the-art satellite communications were installed. By 2000 the facility was fully operational and its purpose as a nuclear weapons research facility a closely held secret. The research station deep in the mountains of Chichijima was, however, the most important part of a much larger enterprise. 50 kilometres to the east a tiny, never before inhabited speck in the Pacific had been prepared to receive Japan's first nuclear test. A hole some 120 metres deep had been drilled and a 50 kiloton device lowered to its bottom. To create an explosion equal to 50,000 tons of TNT is quite easy, if you have the materials. The `active' ingredients for Japan's first nuclear test weighed barely 5 kilograms. A 50 kiloton bomb required a few kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium. The bomb had been assembled on Okinawa a week before the Chinese attack on Vietnam and its seizure of the South China Sea. It had been flown in utmost secrecy to Chichijima on Monday. Engineers worked throughout the night to lower the bomb to the bottom of the well.
The digital display counted back towards zero.
FIVE
There was an air of quiet control in the room. No movement was wasted. Everyone was concentrating on the task at hand: a successful detonation and a comprehensive monitoring of the result… 6, 5, 4, 3, 2…
In an underground nuclear explosion, the force is initially contained within the surrounding rock. The energy, unable to spread out as it would in the atmosphere, soon vaporizes the rock, creating a large hole. The pressure within this cavity rises to millions of atmospheres. The vapours expand in all directions, pulverizing rock further and further away from the point of detonation. Within 80 nanoseconds (80 thousand millionths of a second) the temperature at the bottom of the Ogasawara well was 130,000,000 degrees centigrade and the pressure 100,000,000 atmospheres. The Japanese had detonated the device far enough underground for most of the shock wave created by the explosion to be contained within the Earth's crust. Part of the wave, however, always breaks through the surface, where a tell-tale subsidence crater is visible; as it travels upwards it creates a chimney, whose floor is the explosion cavity, littered with pulverized rock. The rest of the wave travels through the ground that contained the explosion, taking many forms: a series of alternating compressions, a `shear wave' which oscillates up and down, and a series of waves through the earth that resemble the waves of the ocean. Whichever form they take, however, the waves travel a vast distance, carrying an echo of the explosive event all the way around the world. It was this shock wave that special seismographs at Lop Nor in China and observation stations in Australia, Russia, and America detected soon after detonation. It was the first test of a nuclear weapon since 1996, when an international ban was agreed by the nuclear powers. Without warning to any of its allies, Japan had entered the nuclear club.