The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [180]
"Yes." This young Arab was very clever, Fromm thought. "The first bombs used massive steel cases. Ours will use explosives - bulky but light, and just as effective. We will squirt tritium into the core at the moment of ignition. As in the original Israeli design, that will generate large quantities of neutrons to boost the fission reaction; that reaction in turn will blast additional neutrons into another tritium supply, causing a fusion reaction. The energy budget is roughly fifty kilotons from the primary and four hundred from the secondary."
"How much tritium?" While not a difficult substance to obtain in small amounts - watchmakers and gunsight manufacturers used it, but only in microscopic quantities - Ghosn knew supplies over ten miligrams were virtually unobtainable, as he had just discovered himself. Tritium - not plutonium despite what Fromm had said - was the most expensive commercially available material on the planet. You could get tritium, but not plutonium.
"I have fifty grams." Fromm announced smugly. "Far more than we can actually use."
"Fifty grams!" Ghosn exclaimed. "Fifty."
"Our reactor complex was manufacturing special nuclear material for our own bomb project. When the socialist government fell, it was decided to give the plutonium to the Soviets - loyalty to the world socialist cause, you see. The Soviets didn't see things that way. Their reaction -" Fromm paused "- they called it well, I will leave that to your imagination. Their reaction was so strong that I decided to hide our tritium production. As you know it is very valuable commercially - my insurance policy, you might call it."
"Where?"
"In the basement of my home, concealed in some nickel-hydrogen batteries."
Qati didn't like that, not one small bit. The Arab chieftain was not a well man, the German could see, and that did not help him conceal his feelings.
"I need to return to Germany in any case to get the machine tools," he said.
"You have them?"
"Five kilometers from my home is the Karl Marx Astrophysical Institute. We were supposed to manufacture astronomical telescopes there, visual and X-ray telescopes. Alas, it never opened. Such a fine "cover" wasted, eh? In the machine shop, in crates marked ASTROPHYSICAL INSTRUMENTS, are six high-precision, five-axis machines - the finest sort," Fromm observed with a wolfish grin. "Cincinnati Milacron, from the United States of America. Precisely what the Americans use at their Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats, and Pantex fabrication plants."
"What about operators?" Ghosn asked.
"We were training twenty of them, sixteen men and four women, each with a university degree No, that would be too dangerous. It is not really necessary in any case. The machines are "user-friendly," as they say. We could do the work ourselves, but that would take too much time. Any skilled lensmaker - even a master gunsmith, as a matter of fact - can operate them. What was the business of Nobel Prize winners fifty years ago is now the work of a competent machinist," Fromm said. "Such is the nature of progress, Ja?"
"It could be, then again it could not," Yevgeniy said. He'd been on duty for twenty hours straight, and only six hours of fitful sleep separated that from yet another, longer stint.
Finding it, if that indeed was what they'd done, had taken all of Dubinin's skill. He'd guessed that the American missile sub had headed south, and that her cruising speed was in the order of five knots. Next came environmental considerations. He'd had to stay close, within direct-path range, not allowing himself to come into a sonar convergence zone. The CZs were annular - donut - shaped areas around a vessel. Sound that went downward from a point within the convergence zone was refracted by the water temperature and pressure, traveling back and forth to the surface on a helical path at semi-regular intervals that in turn depended on environmental conditions. By staying out of them, relative to where he thought his target was, he could evade one means of detection. To do that meant that