The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

His inability to perform, his tiredness, the drinking, the distraction? Was it
possible that the reason he didn't . . . someone else was exciting him? It
wasn't possible. Not Jack. Not her Jack.
But why else . . . ? She was still attractive – everyone thought so. She was
still a good wife – there was no doubt of that? Jack wasn't ill. She would have
caught any gross symptoms; she was a doctor, and a good one, and she knew she
would not have missed anything important. She went out of her way to be nice to
Jack, to talk to him, to let him know that she loved him, and . . .
Perhaps it wasn't likely, but was it possible?
Yes.
No. Cathy set the paper down and sipped at her coffee. Not possible. Not her
Jack.
***
It was the last hour of the last leg in the manufacturing process. Ghosn and
Fromm watched the lathe with what looked like detachment, but was in both cases
barely controlled excitement. The Freon liquid being sprayed on the rotating
metal prevented their seeing the product whose final manufacture was underway.
That didn't help, even though both knew that seeing would not have helped in the
least. The part of the plutonium mass being machined was hidden from their sight
by other metal, and even if that had been otherwise, they both knew that their
eyes were too coarse an instrument to detect imperfections. Both watched the
machine read-out of the computer systems. Tolerances indicated by the machine
were well within the twelve angstroms specified by Herr Doktor Fromm. They had
to believe the computer, didn't they?
'Just a few more centimeters,' Ghosn said, as Bock and Qati joined them.
'You've never explained the Secondary part of the unit,' the Commander said.
He'd taken to calling the bomb 'the unit'.
Fromm turned, not really grateful for the distraction, though he knew he should
be. 'What do you wish to know?'
'I understand how the Primary works, but not the Secondary,' Qati said, simply
and reasonably.
'Very well. The theoretical side of this is quite straightforward, once you
understand the principle. That was the difficult part, you see, discovering the
principle. It was thought at first that making the Secondary work was simply a
matter of temperature – that is what distinguishes the center of a star, ja?
Actually it is not, the first theoreticians overlooked the matter of pressure.
That is rather strange in retrospect, but pioneering work is often that way. The
key to making the Secondary work is managing the energy in such a way as to
convert energy into pressure at the same time as you use its vast heat, and also
to change its direction by ninety degrees. That is no small task when you are
talking about redirecting seventy kilotons of energy,' Fromm said smugly.
'However, the belief that to make Secondary function is a matter of great
theoretical difficulty, that is a fiction. The real insight Ulam and Teller had
was a simple one, as most great insights are. Pressure is temperature. What they
discovered – the secret – is that there is no secret. Once you understand the
principles involved, what remains is just a question of engineering. Making the
bomb work is computationally, not technically, demanding. The difficult part is