The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

essentially an Israeli copy of an American Mark-12 fission bomb. It's a
boosted-fission design.'
'What does that mean?' Qati asked.
'It means that tritium is squirted into the core just as the act of firing
begins. That generates more neutrons and greatly increases the efficiency of the
reaction. As a result, you need only a small amount of fissionable material . .
.'
'But?' Qati heard the 'but' coming.
Ghosn leaned back and stared at the core of the device. 'But the mechanism to
insert the boost material was destroyed by the impact. The kryton switches for
the conventional explosives are no longer reliable and must be replaced. We have
enough intact explosive blocks to determine their proper configuration, but
manufacturing new ones will be very difficult. Unfortunately, I cannot depend on
simply reverse-engineering the entire weapon. I must duplicate the original
design theoretically first, determine what it can and cannot do, then re-invent
the processes for fabrication. Do you have any idea what the original cost for
that was?'
'No,' Qati admitted, sure that he was about to learn.
'More than what it cost to land people on the moon. The most brilliant minds in
human history were part of this process: Einstein, Fermi, Bohr, Oppenheimer,
Teller, Alvarez, von Neumann, Lawrence – a hundred others! The giants of physics
in this century. Giants.'
'You're telling me you cannot do it?'
Ghosn smiled. 'No, Commander, I am telling you that I can. What is the work of
genius the first time is the work of a tinsmith soon thereafter. It required
genius the first time because it was the first time, and also because technology
was so primitive. All the calculations had to be done manually at first, on big
mechanical calculators. All the work on the first hydrogen bomb was done on the
first primitive computers – Eniac, I think it was called. But today?' Ghosn
laughed. It really was absurd. 'A videogame has more computing power than Eniac
ever did. I can run the calculations on a high-end personal computer in seconds
and duplicate what took Einstein months. But the most important thing is that
they did not really know if it was possible. It is, and I know that! Next, they
made records of how they proceeded. Finally, I have a template, and though I
cannot reverse-engineer it entirely, I can use this as a theoretical model.
'You know, given two or three years, I could do it all myself.'
'Do you think we have two or three years?'
Ghosn shook his head. He'd already reported on what he saw in Jerusalem. 'No,
Commander. We surely do not.'
Qati explained what he had ordered their German friend to do.
'That is good. Where do we move to?'
***
Berlin was once more the capital of Germany. It had been Bock's plan that this
should be so, of course, but not that it should be this sort of Germany. He'd
flown in from Italy – via Greece, and, before that, Syria – and cleared passport
control with scarcely a wave. From that point, he'd simply rented a car and
driven out of Berlin on highway E-74 north towards Greifswald.