He drew another circle on the board and wrote ‘deuterium’ inside it. ‘Also called heavy hydrogen,’ he said, tapping the word deuterium. Alongside the first circle he drew two more. Missing the centre circle he wrote the word tritium into the third circle. ‘Tritium is also called super-heavy hydrogen,’ he said, tapping it. ‘Now what happens in a hydrogen blast? These two fuse. It is a fusion bomb which creates a chain reaction between these two: heavy hydrogen and super-heavy hydrogen. It heats them by a trigger of what?’ He turned to write the answer into the centre circle. A colonel said, ‘Super-duper heavy hydrogen.’ Humpty Dumpty turned round and then laughed, but I wouldn’t have cared to be a captain that said it.
The major drew a chalkline connecting the earlier diagram with the centre circle. ‘The trigger is an atomic bomb. Making it a fission-fusion device. Now in the larger bomb we use a different substance. Uranium 235 is expensive, but Uranium 238 is cheaper but needs a lot more get-up-and-go to be triggered. You surround the trigger with a layer of 238,’ he drew a diagram. ‘But this tends to give a lot of fallout as well as a big energy release. Now you can see that all these bombs, including the red H-blast …’ he wrote ‘August 12, 1953’ on to the list … ‘These bombs all have a standard primitive A-bomb centre and are called fission-fusion-fission bombs. OK?’
The major was stabbing the air with his chalk like a medical student with his first thermometer. ‘Now we come to our little blast-off here at Tokwe. We have a standard 238 bomb, but here,’ he tapped the centre of the inevitable circle, ‘here we have a trigger of an entirely new pattern. The only purpose of the trigger is to get extreme temperatures. OK? Suppose in here we put a king-size shot of TNT and get enough temperature to flash the bomb. Right?’ He wrote ‘TNT’ into the centre of the chalk circle. ‘Then that would be what we call a “high explosive to fusion reaction”.’ He wrote ‘H.E.-fusion’ under that drawing. ‘We haven’t done that and nor has anyone else – in fact it’s probably impossible. Practically all the little countries have got their labs working on this because if they ever do it bombs will be a dime a dozen.’ He rubbed out ‘TNT’ and tapped the blank space. ‘So what do we have here? I’ll tell you. Not a thing.’ He paused while we were all registering appropriate types of surprise. ‘No, we have nothing inside the bomb, but we do have something here.’ He drew a small rectangle at the extreme edge of the board (he could draw any shape, this boy). Inside the rectangle he wrote ‘SVMF’. ‘Here there is the Super Volt Micro Flash mechanism, the SUVOM which for a millionth of a microsecond builds up enough voltage to trip the mechanism. Now as you see, this power is taken into the bomb,’ he drew a long squeaky chalkline joining the bomb to the mechanism, ‘by the umbilical cord. Without the A-bomb trigger there will be no fallout. This will be the first entirely clean bomb. OK?’
The major carefully picked himself a fresh piece of chalk and I sneaked a look at my watch. It was 6.10 P.M. ‘Size,’ he said. ‘What size bomb is this one we have here? This is a fifty-megaton bomb.2 In terms of the destructive area, this is a bomb that would take out a whole city and make the “thin man” look like a dud. We expect Type 2 destruction – that is to say everything flammable gone and severe damage to metal and brick across a thirty-five-mile radius.’ Someone at the other end of the table said, ‘Diameter,’ and Humpty Dumpty said, ‘No; radius!’ There was a low whistle. I guessed that the officer who said diameter had been asked to do so, but it was quite a statement just the same. The major pressed on. ‘In terms of territory it means that a bomb in Bernalillo brings Type 2 as far as Santa Fé and Los Lunas (these were towns in New Mexico near Los Alamos which almost everyone knew in terms of flesh, food, and furlough). There were more exclamations. ‘Or to take another example, from Sacramento right the way down to Redwood City, and that includes the Sheraton Palace.’ It was a private joke and someone laughed at it. The little major was quite enjoying his lecture now, what with everyone being awake and all. ‘For the sake of our guests, I’ll give you another demonstration that may help. Think of Type 2 from Southend to Reading.’ He pronounced it Reeding. He looked at me and I said, ‘If it’s all the same to you I’ll think of it from Santa Fé to Los Lunas.’
The little major gave me a millionth of a microsecond smile and said, ‘Yes – sir, we had to select a jumbo size atoll for this baby. We’re not commuting between here and the shot island every day for the ride. OK?’ I said it was OK, by me.
Next, Battersby stood up and the little major collected his notes together, lit up a two-bit cigar and sat down while a provost lieutenant came in with a little compressed air machine and sprayed water over the blackboard before giving it a thorough cleaning. Other officers told of detection methods used to judge the size and positions of explosions, and how they intended to jam the Russian detection devices like the radar that detects changes in the electric charges in the ionosphere, and the recording barometers that record air and sound waves and produce microbarographs, and the radio signals that are picked up from the release of radio energy at the time of the explosion. The standard and most reliable detection system of analysing fallout residue to find the substances from which the bomb had been constructed was ruled out in this case because it was to be a ‘clean’ bomb.
Battersby told us the structure of the security arrangements, the echelon of command, the dates the firing was likely to take place, and showed us some beautiful diagrams. Then the meeting broke up into sub-meetings. I was to go off with Skip Henderson and a Lt Dolobowski and Jean, while Dalby went into secret session with Battersby’s assistant. Skip said that we may as well go across to his quarters where the fans worked properly and there was a bottle of Scotch. A few of the eager beavers down the other end of the table were destroying notes they had made, by burning them with Messrs Pestpruf’s matches.
Skip had a comfortable little den in the section of camp that came nearest to the sea. A tin cupboard held his uniforms, and an old air-conditioning unit sat astride the window-sill beating the air cold. On the army table were a few books; German grammar; Trial by Ordeal, by Caryl Chessman; two paperback westerns, Furnace Installation – a Guide, and A Century of Ribald Stories. On the window-sill was a bottle of Scotch, gin, some assorted mixes, a glass containing a dozen sharpened pencils, and an electric razor.
From the window I could see a mile or so up the beach one way, and nearly half a mile the other. In both directions the beach was still encrusted with debris, and a flimsy jetty limped painfully into the water. The sun was a dark red fireball, just like the one we were trying to create on tower island a few miles north.
Skip poured us all a generous shot of Black Label, and even remembered to leave the ice out of mine.
‘So that’s the way it is,’ he said. ‘You and this young lady here decide to catch a little sunshine at John Government’s expense?’ He waited for me to speak.
I spoke. ‘It’s just that I have so many unsolved crimes on my hands that I have become the unsolved crime expert – anyone with an unsolved crime on their hands, they send for me.’
‘And you solve it?’
‘No, only file it.’
Skip poured me another drink, looked at the dark-eyed little lieutenant, and said, ‘I hope you’ve got a large family economy size file with you this trip.’ He sat down on the bed and unlocked his brief-case. I noticed the steel liner inside it. ‘No one can tell you the whole picture because we haven’t put it together yet. But we are in a spot; the stuff we are getting back from EW 192 is verbatim stuff we are putting in our files. Verbatim. No sooner is a discovery made in our labs than it is broadcast to the other side of the world.’
The CIA numbers its rooms with a prefix telling which wing it’s situated in. Room 192 in the East Wing is really a large suite of rooms and its job is relaying information from the heart of foreign governments. It deals only with agents getting stuff from sacrosanct crevices available to highest-level foreign officials. It would certainly