A loud honking noise seemed to explode in the room. It was the Secretary of Energy blowing his nose. Delbert Crandell had a face that was stained the roseate hue of the overfed and underexercised. He was a Texan, cross, outspoken, and at the same time a knowledgeable physicist. With a dab of his handkerchief he cleaned up a stray splotch of mucus from the conference table and returned it to his vest pocket.
“If the only thing that stands between us and Qaddafi’s making an atomic bomb from that French reactor of his,” he noted in his rasping voice, “is those UN people over there in Vienna, we’d best head for the bomb shelters right now. They’re like all those UN agencies. They’re so choked up by their Third World politics they couldn’t fart if they spent all night eating red beans and ham hocks.
They’ve got inspectors over there who can’t tell a screwdriver from a monkey wrench. Some South American dictator’s son who got the job because it was Argentina’s turn to fill the slot.”
It appeared for an instant that Crandell was through, but he was not.
Almost angrily, he turned to~ Bennington.
“I’ll tell you something else. Your own CIA, nuclear inspection program isn’t worth a shit, either. You’ve spent five years trying to figure out what the South Africans are up to, and you still don’t know. The Indians blew up a bomb under your nose and you didn’t have a clue they were going to do it. Hell, you people didn’t even know the Israelis had a bomb until Ed Teller came back and told you they’d built one-with our goddamn uranium smuggled out of that plant up there in Pennsylvania.”
The President rapped the table with his knuckles. “Gentlemen, we’re wandering. Could Qaddafi have gotten the plutonium he’d need to make nuclear weapons out of that French reactor if he had cheated on it?”
His glance addressed the question to Harold Brown. The President had asked Brown to return to Washington as his Science Adviser. No one in the room was better qualified to answer it than he was. Brown was a former director of the Livermore, California, weapons laboratory, expresident of Cal Tech and a brilliant nuclear physicist.
“Of course be could,” be answered. “The French and the Germans have been going around the world for years trying to tell people you can’t get nuclear weapons out of a nuclear power plant, so that they can sell more of them. Well, the fact is you can. We blew off a bomb made with plutonium that came from a reactor’s burnedout fuel rods fifteen years ago. They know that. We gave them the results.”
“Well, he’d still have to reprocess the plutonium, wouldn’t he? Find a way to get it out of those fuel rods?”
“Mr. President, there’s a common misconception in the world that reprocessing plutonium is a very complex, costly technique,” Brown replied.
“It isn’t. It’s nothing but straightforward chemistry and it’s all out there in the books. If you want to do it on an amateurish basis, you don’t need any of those complicated choppers or cold rooms. All you need is time, money and people and not all that much of any of them.”
The President’s skeptical regard told Brown that he wasn’t convinced.
“You know how the Russians clear a minefield, don’t you? They march a company of men through it, right? If Qaddafi used the same technique here, got himself twenty Palestinian commandos willing to expose themselves to more radiation than was good for them for the cause, then the whole thing would become almost terrifyingly simple. In six months they could extract enough plutonium from the used fuel rods of a reactor like that to make twenty bombs. In a couple of cow barns where a satellite would never spot them.”
The Science Adviser sighed. “The PLO gets plenty of commandos to volunteer for suicide raids. Why wouldn’t they be able to get twenty of them to volunteer to die of cancer to make a weapon that could destroy Israel?”
Two thirds of the way across the United States, Harold Agnew, the director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, stared anxiously out of his office window to the blinking lights of the lovely little community nestling at his feet on the Pajarito Plateau, seven thousand feet into the mountains of New Mexico. It was a quintessentially upper-middle-class American town of adobe homes and ranch-style houses, well-watered lawns and neat gardens; with the red-and-yellow-beacon of its McDonald’s, a Holiday Inn and, on the Municipal Building’s lawn, a red-painted thermometer measuring the community’s progress toward its United Way Fund goal.
And yet the sole reason for the existence of Los Alamos was the creation of the means of mass destruction. It was here thirty-six years before that man had designed and produced his first nuclear weapon. The office of Harold Agnew was a museum to that achievement. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Einstein, Bohr, ghosts of geniuses long dead, stared down from portraits on the wall at the man who was now the guardian of their great enterprise. The primitive lab at Berkeley where the first submicroscopic particle of plutonium had been produced, the world’s first atomic pile, the crew of the Enola Gay on the eve of their terrible voyage to Hiroshima-every milestone along that historic route was recorded by a photograph on Agnew’s wall.
Harold Agnew himself was one of the few men still alive of the score of scientists who had been present at the birth of the Atomic Age in a converted squash court under the west stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field on a bitter cold November day in 1942. He was a big, burly blond man with sloping shoulders and heavy arms, a man who looked as if he should have been a second-generation Swede running a gas station in northern Minnesota rather than the director of one of the most sophisticated scientific institutions in the world.
When he had marched up the mesa sprawled below him with Oppenheimer and Groves to build the first atomic bomb, all the plutonium on planet Earth could have fit on the head of a pin with room left over for a flight of angels to dance. And now? Agnew thought moodily, contemplating those blinking lights. That was a question which had come naturally during the trials of the last hour while a team of his weapons designers had labored over the blueprint delivered to the White House gate. They had broken the blueprint down into its components, picking it apart, hunting the one fatal flaw, the one violation of the very precise rules of nuclear weaponry which would render the design meaningless. Outside his office, on the huge Los Alamos computer banks, other men had run off the formulas that had come in with the design, checking neutron densities, heating factors, lens curvatures against the figures stored on the computer.
As the minutes had gone by, Agnew’s thoughts had frequently gone back to that exalting morning in Chicago almost forty years ago. He’d been down on the atomic pile with two friends and an ax that day, ready to cut a rope and flood the pile with a cadmium solution if the reaction ran away-and if they were still alive to cut it.
Enrico Fermi, the great Italian physicist, had been up on the balcony calmly giving orders in his rich tenor voice. The counter had started to go wild, running faster and faster like a heart fibrillating. Nothing had shaken the Italian’s composure. Finally he had taken out his slide rule, made a series of quick movements, then nodded his head and said, “It’s self-sustaining.” With those words, mankind had entered the era of the atom.
For Agnew, the exaltation, the exhilaration of that great moment were as alive now as they had been then. They had known at that instant they could beat the Germans to their terrible goal. But, above all, they had shared the conviction that man had mastered at last the elements of his globe, harnessed to his own ends its most primeval force.
The rasp of his buzzer interrupted him just as the last pale light of day was fleeing the mountainscape of New Mexico.