The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

uilding?'
'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
DDR'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.