raise their two ruggedly independent daughters. Mary lived in Knoxville, and they’d remained friends.
A tall, slightly stooped man with close-cropped gray hair and intense gray eyes, Booker kept fit by taking rambling hikes in the mountains. He also liked to paddle his battered Old Town canoe on the nearby Clinch River.
His colleagues considered him a workaholic, irascible, but brilliant.
Soon after getting his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Booker had joined the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in southern California. He’d spent nearly a dozen years helping Livermore design nuclear bombs and had become a recognized master of the arcane art of “boosting” weapons—making them more powerful by layering thermonuclear fuels in the bomb’s “physics package,” greatly enhancing the weapon’s destructive impact.
When Booker ended his career at Livermore, he was in charge of the laboratory’s underground nuclear tests in the famous “Area 51” at the Nevada Test Site. He’d spent entire months on bomb “shots,” living in dusty trailers, traveling into Vegas on the weekends. None of it had helped his marriage, which had begun to unravel during his stint at the NTS.
Needing a change, he joined the nuclear engineering staff at ORNL.
Semiretired, he stayed on at Oak Ridge as a consultant and was helping with test shots in the Shock Wave Lab. The firing was done in a remote corner of one of the mammoth buildings once used to separate uranium-235 from natural uranium. Since the end of the war, these Alpha and Beta buildings had served other purposes. The Shock Wave Lab was in the old Alpha building. Painted a dull red like so many of the other buildings at Y-12, it was made of concrete reinforced with steel rods. Its dimensions were prodigious, 543 feet by 312 feet. The labyrinth of piping and equipment the uranium-enrichment process required accounted for these oversize buildings, many of which still lined First Street at the ORNL complex.
Booker had helped design a refitted naval cannon that had been lengthened and retooled to fire a pellet-sized piece of iron at twenty thousand miles an hour into a target—a vacuum impact tank. The 140-foot-long gun resembled a rifle barrel outfitted with a huge silencer. The barrel rested on a series of metal supports. The lab actually used two cannons, depending on the purpose of the shot. One fired at a slightly higher speed. They were lowered into place by an overhead crane. In nanoseconds the guns generated colossal temperatures that matched those at the center of the earth, thereby offering a glimpse of what pressures were like at the iron core of the planet, where the temperature was over twelve thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
A key ingredient in these firings was the explosive propellant. Booker had shaped the special compound himself, a mixture of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, which was also used to detonate nuclear weapons. The explosive charge drove a sixty-pound piston that squeezed hydrogen gas down the barrel.
The shots were done in the early morning when the building was deserted. The sound of the projectile moving at thousands of miles an hour and hitting the impact tank wasn’t much—the metallic clink of a coin pitched into a coffee can. But the shock wave that followed was a hummer. On previous firings, windows had been blown out of adjoining buildings. Doors had flown open, and floors had shaken.
The firing was done from a bunker of reinforced concrete located near the impact chamber. The bunker was a gray blockhouse about six feet high and eight feet long. Outfitted with an array of equipment, it had steel doors and a window slit covered with shatterproof glass.
“How’s the VISAR checking out?” Booker asked one of the two geophysicists he was working with, a young Ph.D. named Ed Graves. VISAR was the acronym for Velocity Interferometer System for Any Reflector. It was used to measure shock waves.
“All go.”
“What about the pyrometer?” The device measured high temperatures.
“Up and running,” said the other geophysicist, Len Miller. With the ORNL for twenty-five years, he was their leading “deep earth” specialist.
“What about the camera?” They used a rotating mirror streak camera with a xenon light source to measure shock velocity.
“Ready,” said Miller.
“Let’s do a shoot,” Booker said. He sat at the computer terminal that monitored the firing systems and various recording devices. He rapidly went down the checklist one more time. Miller sat next to him and would do the actual firing. He removed the cover from a red toggle switch.
“Here we go,” Booker said. He started the countdown from ten.
He’d reached six when a powerful ground tremor almost threw him out of his chair.
“Dammit, Len. It wasn’t time.”
He thought that Miller had accidentally fired the cannon. Then the floor shook again, even harder. Booker pressed a button that disarmed the gun.
“Boys, we’ve got ourselves an earthquake,” he said.
The first two shocks had been very strong, but the next one was even more violent, knocking all three men out of their seats.
“We’ve never had a quake in this part of the state,” said Graves.
“We’re sure… as hell… having one now,” said Miller, gritting his teeth as he spoke. “I’d put this… way up on the Richter.”
Booker was used to earthquakes. A few mild shakes out in the Nevada desert, just enough to rattle the windows. Nothing like this.
“I don’t know how much longer the building can take all this shaking,” said Miller. He was astounded by the length and intensity of the tremors.
“These walls are two feet thick and reinforced with steel,” Booker said. The Alpha building was a virtual fortress, designed under top secrecy to house an electromagnetic process for enriching uranium for the A-bomb. It had been built in segments, like a honeycomb with each segment consisting of four walls and a separate roof. The segments or “rooms” fit together like the interlocking pieces of a puzzle to form the building. The Shock Wave Lab was in one of these 100-by-200-foot rooms.
A chunk of concrete as big as a piano hit the bunker and shattered. It was part of the roof.
The ground was still shaking—a strong lateral motion.
More concrete rained down on them. Then, after several long minutes, the ground quieted. Booker carefully opened the bunker door just wide enough to glance up at the roof. He could see black sky through the gaping holes.
“Let’s get out, now,” said Miller.
“We can’t,” Booker said. Large pieces of the roof blocked the only doorway out of the building. They were trapped. And the ground was starting to shake again. One jarring tremor, followed quickly by another.
“The first aftershocks,” Miller said. “This is one mother of an earthquake.”
Scrambling out of the bunker, Booker put his back to the bulky steel impact tank located within a foot of the cannon barrel. He strained to move it.
“Give me a hand,” he said, gasping.
“What are you doing, Fred?” asked Graves. He started pushing the heavy tank, putting his back to it until they’d moved it off to the side, away from the barrel. The cannon now pointed directly at the wall.
“We’re going to try to shoot our way out of this damn place before the building collapses.” Booker said.
The three men hurried back into the firing bunker and strapped themselves into their seats.
“You ever done anything like this before?” asked Graves. His face was ashen.
“Can’t say I have,” Booker said. He scanned the instrumentation panel, making a few minor adjustments. The compressed gas levels were fine. They could fire the propellant.
“You ready, Len?”
“You want to run the countdown?”
“Just do it!” Booker shouted.
Miller threw the toggle switch. The cannon fired with that strangely muffled sound, but the concussive impact of the projectile blasting into the wall was crushing. The entire building shook. The shock wave lifted Booker a few inches out of his seat.
He opened the bunker’s steel door and cautiously peered out. The cannon had blasted a four-foot hole through the concrete wall.
“Let’s go for it!” Booker shouted. He followed the other two men through the hole, bending at the waist to
