visitor.
“Morning, sir”
“Grab a seat” A steward served coffee to both men “How’s the wing look?”
“I think we'll be ready on time, sir ”
Admiral Joshua Painter, USN, was Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Commander-in-Chief Atlantic, and Commander-in-Chief U.S. Atlantic Fleet — they paid him only one salary for the three jobs, though he did have three staffs to do his thinking for him A career aviator — mainly fighters — he had reached the summit of his career He would not be selected for Chief of Naval Operations. Someone with fewer politically rough edges would get that job, but Painter was content. Under the rather eccentric organization of the armed services, the CNO and other service chiefs merely advised the Secretary of Defense The SecDef was the one who gave the orders to the area CINCs — commanders-in-chief. SACL ANT — CINCLANT — CINCLANT F LT might have been an awkward, cumbersome, and generally bloated command, but it was a command. Painter owned real ships, real airplanes, and real marines, had the authority to tell them where to go and what to do Two complete fleets, 2nd and 6th, came under his authority: seven aircraft carriers, a battleship — though an aviator, Painter rather liked battleships, his grandfather had commanded one — over a hundred destroyers and cruisers, 60 submarines, a division and a half of marines, thousands of combat aircraft The fact of the matter was that only one country in the world had more combat power than Joshua Painter did, and that country was no longer a serious strategic threat in these days of international amity. He no longer had to look forward to the possibility of war. Painter was a happy man. A man who'd flown missions over Vietnam, he'd seen American power go from its post-World War II peak to its nadir in the 1970s, then bounce back again until America once more was the most powerful country on earth. He'd played his part in the best of times and the worst of times, and now the best of times were better still. Robby Jackson was one of the men to whom his Navy would be turned over.
“What's this I heard about Soviet pilots in Libya again?” Jackson asked.
“Well, they never really left, did they?” Painter asked rhetorically. “Our friend wants their newest weapons, and he's paying with hard cash. They need the cash. It's business. That's simple enough.”
“You'd think he'd learn,” Robby observed with a shake of the head.
“Well, maybe he will… soon. It must be real lonely being the last of the hotheads. Maybe that's why he's loading up while he still can. That's what the intel people say.”
“And the Russians?”
“Quite a lot of instructors and technical people there on contract, especially aviators and SAM types.”
“Nice to know. If our friend tries anything, he's got some good stuff to hide behind.”
“Not good enough to stop you, Robby.”
“Good enough to make me write some letters.” Jackson had written enough of those. As a CAG, he could look forward on this cruise — as with every other he'd ever taken — to deaths in his air wing. To the best of his knowledge, no carrier had ever sailed for a deployment, whether in peace or war, without some fatalities, and as the “owner” of the air wing, the deaths were his responsibility. Wouldn't it be nice to be the first, Jackson thought. Aside from the fact that it would look good on his record, not having to tell a wife or a set of parents that Johnny had lost his life in service of his country… possible, but not likely, Robby told himself. Naval aviation was too dangerous. Past forty now, knowing that immortality was something between a myth and a joke, he had already found himself staring at the pilots in the squadron ready rooms and wondering which of the handsome, proud young faces would not be around when TR again made landfall at the Virginia Capes, whose pretty, pregnant wife would find a chaplain and another aviator on her doorstep just before lunch, along with a squadron wife to hold her hand when the world ended in distant fire and blood. A possible clash with Libyans was just one more threat in a universe where death was a permanent resident. He'd gotten too old for this life, Jackson admitted quietly to himself. Still as fine a fighter pilot as any — he was too mature to call himself the world's best anymore, except over drinks — the sadder aspects of the life were catching up, and it would soon be time to move on, if he were lucky, to an admiral's flag, just flying occasionally to show he still knew how and trying to make the good decisions that would minimize the unwanted visits.
“Problems?” Painter asked.
“Spares,” Captain Jackson replied. “It's getting harder to keep all the birds up.”
“Doing the best we can.”
“Yes, sir, I know. Going to get worse, too, if I'm reading the papers right.” Like maybe three carriers would be retired, along with their air wings. Didn't people ever learn?
“Every time we've won a war we've been punished for it,” CINCLANT said. “At least winning this one didn't cost us a whole lot. Don't worry, there'll be a place for you when the time comes. You're my best wing commander, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir. I don't mind hearing things like that.”
Painter laughed. “Neither did I.”
“There is a saying in English,” Golovko observed. “’With friends like these, who has need of enemies?’ What else do we know?”
“It would appear that they turned over their entire supply of plutonium,” the man said. A representative of the weapons research and design institute at Sarova, south of Gorkiy, he was less a weapons engineer than a scientist who kept track of what people outside the Soviet Union were up to. “I ran the calculations myself. It is theoretically possible that they developed more of the material, but what they turned over to us slightly exceeds our own production of plutomum from plants of similar design here in the Soviet Union. I think we got it all from them.”
“I have read all that. Why are you here now?”
“The original study overlooked something.”
“And what might that be?” the First Deputy Chairman of the Committee for State Security asked.
“Tritium.”
“And that is?” Golovko didn't remember He was not an expert on nuclear materials, being more grounded in diplomatic and intelligence operations.
The man from Sarova hadn't taught basic physics in years. “Hydrogen is the simplest of materials. An atom of hydrogen contains a proton, which is positively charged, and an electron, which is negatively charged. If you add a neutron — that has no electrical charge — to the hydrogen atom, you get deuterium Add another, and you get tritium. It has three times the atomic weight of hydrogen, because of the additional neutrons. In simple terms, neutrons are the stuff of atomic weapons. When you liberate them from their host atoms, they radiate outward, bombarding other atomic nuclei, releasing more neutrons. That causes a chain reaction, releasing vast amounts of energy. Tritium is useful because the hydrogen atom is not supposed to contain any neutrons at all, much less two of them. It is unstable, and tends to break down at a fixed rate. The half-life of tritium is 12.3 years,” he explained. “Thus if you insert tritium in a fission device, the additional neutrons it adds to the initial fission reaction accelerate or ”boost“ the fission in the plutomum or uranium reaction mass by a factor of between five and forty, allowing a far more efficient use of the heavy fission materials, like plutomum or enriched uranium Secondly, additional amounts of tritium placed in the proper location nearby the fission device — called a ”primary“ in this case — begin a fusion reaction. There are other ways of doing this, of course. The chemicals of choice are lithium-deuteride and lithium- hydride, which is more stable, but tritium is still extremely useful for certain weapons applications.”
“And how does one make tritium?”
“Essentially by placing large quantities of lithium-aluminum in a nuclear reactor and allowing the thermal neutron flux — that's an engineering term for the back-and-forth traffic of the particles — to irradiate and transform lithium to tritium by capture of some of the neutrons. It turns up as small, faceted bubbles inside the metal. I believe that the Germans also manufactured tritium at their Greifswald plant”
“Why? What evidence do you have?”
“We analyzed the plutomum they sent us. Plutonium has two isotopes, Plutonium-239 and –240. From the relative proportions, you can determine the neutron flux in the reactor. The German sample has too little 240. Something was attenuating the neutron flux. That something was probably — almost certainly — tritium.”
“You are certain of that?”
“The physics involved here are complex but straightforward. In fact you can in many cases identify the plant that produced a plutomum sample by examining the ratio of various materials. My team and I are quite certain of our conclusions.”
