The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [231]
"So, how was Hawaii?" Mancuso asked, surprised and very pleased with the Commanding Officer (Gold) of USS Maine.
"This is very interesting. The Karl Marx Astrophysical Institute." The KGB colonel handed the black-and-whites over to Golovko.
The First Deputy Chairman looked over the photos and set them down. "Empty building?"
"Nearly so. Inside, we found this. It's a delivery manifest for five American machine tools. Very good ones, extremely expensive."
"Used for?"
"Used for many things, like the fabrication of telescope mirrors, which fits very nicely with the institute's cover. The same instruments, our friends at Sarova tell us, are used to shape components for nuclear weapons."
"Tell me about the institute."
"Much of it appears to be entirely legitimate. Its head was to have been the DDK's leading cosmologist. It's been absorbed by the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. They're planning to build a large telescope complex in Chile, and are designing an X-ray observation satellite with the European Space Agency. It is noteworthy that X-ray telescopes have a rather close relationship with nuclear-weapons research."
"How does one tell the difference between scientific research and -"
"You can't," the colonel admitted. "I've done some checking. We have leaked information on this ourselves."
"What? How?"
"There have been a number of articles published in various professional journals about stellar physics. One begins, "Imagine the center of a star with an X-ray flux of such and such," except for one small thing: the star the author described has a flux much higher than the center of any star - by fourteen orders of magnitude."
"I don't understand." Golovko was having trouble with all this scientific gibberish.
"He described a physical environment in which the activity was one hundred thousand billion times the intensity inside any star. He was, in fact, describing the interior of a thermonuclear bomb at the moment of detonation."
"And how the hell did that get past censors!" Golovko demanded in amazement.
"General, how scientifically literate do you think our censors are? As soon as that one saw "imagine the center of a star," he decided that it was not a matter of state security at all. That article was published fifteen years ago. There are others. In the past week I've discovered just how useless our secrecy measures are. You can imagine what it's like from the Americans. Fortunately, it requires a very clever chap to assimilate all the data. But it is by no means impossible. I've talked to a team of young engineers at Kyshtym. With a little push from here, we can initiate an in-depth study of how extensive the open scientific literature is. That will take five to six months. It does not directly affect this particular project, but I think it would be a most useful study to undertake. I think it likely that we have systematically underestimated the danger of third-world nuclear weapons."
"But that's not true," Golovko objected. "We know that -"
"General, I helped write that study three years ago. I am telling you that I was grossly optimistic in my assessments."
The First Deputy Chairman thought about that for a few seconds. "Poor Ivan'ch, you are an honest man."
"I am a frightened man," the colonel replied.
"Back to Germany."
"Yes. Of the people we suspect were part of the DDK bomb project, three are unaccounted for. All three men and their families are gone. The rest have found other work. Two could possibly be involved in nuclear research with weapons applications,