on the same side as the British. Richter had never met Tony Herron, but he knew his name from SIS reports.
Herron was six feet tall, sandy haired and, like Richter, appeared slightly rumpled. He welcomed Richter into his inner sanctum, and they settled down to business. ‘I’ve had several Flash and Immediate Top Secret signals from SIS London,’ Herron began. ‘From these I gather that something is afoot with our eastern neighbours, despite
‘Spot on. Do you want the background now, or wait until we talk to the French?’
‘It can wait. One question, though. What grade is the information you have?’
‘Grade One – no question.’
Information obtained by all Secret Services is graded according to source and type. Under the United Kingdom grading system, Grade One data is absolutely, one hundred per cent correct without any possibility of error; Grade Two is probably correct; Grade Three is possibly correct; Grade Four is unlikely to be correct, and Grade Five is known to be incorrect. Most of the information Richter had obtained had been unwillingly provided by Orlov, and he had no doubt at all of its veracity.
‘I was afraid you’d say that. It’s the—’ Herron broke off as the telephone rang and he answered it. He identified himself, then listened without speaking for a couple of minutes. ‘Thank you, Your Excellency,’ he said, replaced the receiver and looked at Richter. ‘You certainly got the Ambassador’s attention. That was His Nibs – we have an appointment in fifteen minutes with DST operational staff at the rue des Saussaies.’
The
Richter looked at his watch. ‘How long to get there?’
‘No time at all – it’s just around the corner, off the place Beauvau,’ Herron replied. He pressed a button on the telephone, told the duty officer where he was going, then grabbed his jacket and headed for the door.
Herron and Richter were escorted to a small conference room on the second floor where three people waited, seated at a long table. The man at the end announced, in perfect English, that he was the senior officer, Colonel Pierre Lacomte, introduced the other two Frenchmen as DST officers, and requested that the Englishmen sit down. Tony Herron briefly outlined the reason for their visit, introduced Richter as a colleague from SIS London, then handed over to him.
‘We have a problem,’ Richter began, ‘and so do you.’ He opened his briefcase, pulled out the operation file and opened it on the table in front of him. ‘We have code-named this operation “Overkill”, which is actually quite appropriate. What I’m about to tell you will probably sound most unlikely, perhaps even impossible, but I can assure you that it isn’t.’ Richter glanced at the other men in the room – none showed any signs of dozing off. ‘Before I explain the present situation, I have to give you some background information – a bit of history, if you like.’ Richter looked at the two DST men. ‘Some of this is moderately technical, so please stop me if there are any words you do not understand, and perhaps Colonel Lacomte could then translate for you.’
Lacomte nodded agreement. ‘Back in 1958,’ Richter said, ‘a man named Sam Cohen, who was employed as a strategic nuclear weapons analyst by the Rand Corporation in California, started looking into the secondary effects caused by the detonation of large thermonuclear weapons. One thing that struck him was the very high level of neutron emissions that was essentially a by-product of the detonation of a fusion weapon. Normally a hydrogen bomb has an outer casing of uranium which is irradiated by those neutrons and which contributes to the explosive yield of the weapon. Cohen theorized that if a bomb was designed without the uranium casing, the released neutrons would travel considerable distances and could penetrate pretty much anything. As neutron radiation has a high lethality, such a weapon would be an excellent people-killer, but due to the lower explosive yield of the weapon, it would cause much less structural damage on detonation.
‘And there was another benefit. Nuclear fallout is mainly caused by the products of fission reactions, and this weapon was by definition a fusion device triggered, like all fusion weapons, by a very small fission explosion. So, a bomb of this type would release only about one per cent of the radiation of a fission bomb of comparable size, causing minimal fallout, and the neutron radiation disperses very quickly, which would mean that the area could be entered comparatively soon after detonation. This was the birth of the Enhanced Radiation Weapon or neutron bomb.’
‘The ERW, Mr Beatty? This is hardly news, is it?’ Whatever Colonel Lacomte had been expecting, it clearly hadn’t been a lesson on the physics of nuclear weapons.
‘No, Colonel, it isn’t news, but it is essential background. Anyway, the neutron bomb became a political football. The Kennedy administration decided not to build any such weapons because it might affect their relations with the Soviet Union, but when the Russians broke the existing moratorium on nuclear weapons tests they changed their mind. The first American ERW was tested in 1962 and large-scale manufacture began in the 1970s, when President Carter proposed installing neutron warheads on Lance missiles and howitzer artillery shells to be deployed in Europe. That decision caused such political turmoil that Carter eventually backed down, indefinitely deferring any such deployment. Reagan was more of a hawk, and re-authorized the production of ERWs, but with the caveat that they would be stored in America and only deployed to Europe if hostilities broke out. The Russians, who were largely behind the “ban the neutron bomb” campaign, had secretly developed their own ERWs. France had tested its own version of the weapon by 1980 and began series production in 1982.’
‘Your information is out-of-date, Mr Beatty. We ceased production of these weapons in 1986, and that is not a secret.’
‘Agreed, Colonel. But France didn’t destroy her existing stocks, did she? Nor did the Americans, who still hold in excess of seven hundred neutron warheads, all of tactical, not strategic, size. The latest information we have suggests that China, Israel and South Africa, at the very least, all have stockpiles of neutron weapons of various sizes and yields.’
The DST men seemed to be keeping up with Richter, but Tony Herron looked moderately confused. Richter smiled at him. ‘That’s the history, and most of the background. There are just a couple of other things you need to know. First, since
‘Second, it’s well known that to construct a fission bomb you need uranium-235, but to build a fusion weapon or a neutron bomb you have to have access to plutonium. That’s a well-known fact, and it’s completely wrong.’ Richter paused and looked at Colonel Lacomte. ‘Have you ever heard of red mercury?’ he asked.
By five fifteen a.m., local time, the last of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their aides had assembled in the National Military Command Center – a suite of offices on the third floor of the Pentagon. The noisiest section of the NMCC is the office which handles the raw data, because of the rows of clattering telex machines that bring in reports and information from sources worldwide. It has a bank of clocks set for a variety of world time zones and a permanent display of maps showing the dispersal of strategic assets and troops of all major national armed forces. Quiet by comparison, the Emergency Conference Room is next door.
The ECR is a split-level room. On the lower level, the duty officers, known as the Battle Staff, sit on both sides of the ‘leg’ of a vast T-shaped table, collating data. Four Emergency Action officers sit at purpose-built consoles along the top of the ‘T’, each with communication links to American forces around the world. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the President’s military advice team, sit on a raised platform slightly above and to the left of the table used by the Battle Staff. On the opposite side of the room, and in front of the Joint Chiefs, are six huge colour
