but soaked black by an intense concentration of cosmic radiation. Otherwise called a ‘hot’ area. As the Commanding General said at the time, ‘If the atmosphere is taking that kind of cosmic ray penetration we’d better get into the lead suit business.’ But the world wasn’t taking it. This was an atomic explosion.
In that briefing-room in that Pacific USAF base a big truth slowly took shape in the minds of these airmen. There had been no American bomb exploded that year.
The whole base swung into action. One after another the huge B29s trundled around the perimeter track and stepped off the end of the runway into the heavy tropical night air. This time, however, these were planes of the Atomic Bomb Detection Unit which had been formed only the previous year. Special aircraft scooping dust particles from the air as they retraced the path of the afternoon flight. Two Atomic Energy Commission laboratories in the United States had been alerted to stand by for the dust samples.
It took five days before Washington had the detailed report. The explosion it said was almost certainly a bomb. (Until September 23 it was stated that there was a one-in-twenty chance that it wasn’t a bomb.) Moreover the particles indicated a plutonium device. This was an explosion six times more powerful than the Hiroshima one and not to be compared with the first American explosion at Alamogordo.
At this time the organization called MANHATTAN DISTRICT (code-named Post Office Box 1663) which included the Los Alamos Weapons Laboratory near Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Isotope Separation Plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the plutonium piles at Hanford, Washington had all been handed over to the Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC did the whole job, getting the ores of the fissionable heavy metals, uranium and thorium, converting them into concentrations of pure metal as well as supervising production of radio-active isotopes for ship and submarine propulsion and electricity generators.
When the report of the dust particles came through to Washington it had a ‘Top Secret’ rating, and was delivered to William Webster, Chairman of the Defense Department’s atomic liaison committee who took it to the Secretary of Defense: Louis Johnson.
Together they surveyed the guesses of their intelligence departments. The basis of US expectation of a Soviet bomb was the prediction made in 1945 by the chief of MANHATTAN DISTRICT Major-General L. R. Groves, who said it would take the Russians fifteen or twenty years. The Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr Vannevar Bush, said ‘ten years’, in his book
The US Defense Department asked London for confirmation of the Siberian explosion and Ross made his name overnight. Ross had placed his contacts with pessimistic insight. Not only did he know about the explosion (Ross had had all BOAC aircraft fitted with scoops for two years before the bang), but through a couple of well- placed AEC officials he’d had access to the Washington report for nearly twenty-four hours by the time they came through on the transatlantic scrambled line. Just to rub it in, Ross sent the Americans a summary of the physicists working on the project (Peter Kapitza, Fersman, Frenkel, Joffe) and predicted with uncanny accuracy the awards the Soviet scientists were going to receive before
From ‘Joe One’ onwards, Ross just couldn’t go wrong.
TOKWE TWIST: Stir and strain on to rocks: 2 OZ bourbon, ? OZ benedictine. Twist of lemon peel. Serve.
MANHATTAN PROJECT: To a Manhattan: (2 OZ whisky, ? OZ sweet vermouth, dash Angostura and a cherry) add ? OZ cherry brandy.
GREENBACK (or Moolah, or Cabbage): Shake or stir: 1? OZ whisky, 1 OZ dry vermouth, a sprinkle of green chartreuse and of green
I could see Grenade’s small black eyeballs and long greasy hair, and a dour smileless face which lit up once per year. Before the war he was a radio ham and ran a little radio repair shop in Joigny, a Michelinstarred town a hundred kilometres south of Paris.
Grenade was a resistance worker in 1940 when to work actively against the Germans was unfashionable enough to make being turned in to them by a dazed patriot a real risk. Grenade was a de Gaullist when everyone else in France was rooting for Marshal Petain. He was a Gaullist when even the Allied Governments were doing deals with Darlan and Giroud helping them persecute anti-Axis agents and leaving de Gaulle to find out about the North African invasion from his newspaper. Grenade never faltered and never altered.
He organized a train-wrecking group until it was penetrated and the survivors fled. Grenade drifted north to Paris without friends, work or papers. In Paris he met a couple of unemployed printers. By lavish promises of money he got access to a printing machine, and they began printing false passes and papers.
To run counter to law and order was patriotic and their patriotism was in no way muted by the fact that they made a great deal of money. Some of it went into political and anti-German organizations, and without Grenade’s profits from printing food, clothes and petrol coupons, one of the escape chains to the Pyrenees would have collapsed before it finally did. Over thirty Allied airmen passed through Grenade’s flat and that was only an overflow accommodation. After the war such groups tended to hang on to each other and adapt to the new circumstances. They made papers and passports for ‘displaced persons’ who were rich enough to buy, and at one time even forged Camel cigarette packets.
In June, 1947 Grenade had been mixed up with the Perrier gang who worked from the Acceuil Cafe on the Left Bank, and had completed a lucrative line in hundred-dollar American Express travellers’ cheques. Apart from the red serial numbers being a little dark, and the watermarks being printed instead of impressed, they were pretty good. They fetched about a third of their value on the blackmarket, and eagerly at that. Some were detected going across the border in diplomatic bags. Grenade got into the story because he had found a method of microfilming certain diplomatic mail. When under pressure from American Express the French police staked out the courier routes, they found Grenade with 50,000 dollars of forged signed travellers’ cheques. French Intelligence for whom Grenade had worked off and on since the first radio contacts in September, 1940 were now unable to extricate him since there were political involvements. I’d known Grenade about two years and liked him. With little or no risk to me I decided he could be of use as a close friend. I knew that a contact of mine with access to US Army documents had a brother who’d come through the Paris escape route in 1944. I let him think it was Grenade’s. Although there was no way of telling for sure, I like to think that it was, too. He wrote up a document, one showing Grenade as a US Army agent investigating forgeries of US military scrip money and inserted it into the files. I then leaked the information to one of the American Express detectives, and to the 2nd secretary of a senator. At the first opportunity after charges against Grenade were dropped, the forged papers were destroyed. Now Grenade was returning the favour.
Scene III. The Same. A street near the Capitol. Enter ARTEMIDORUS reading a paper.
Even from a normal-style H-bomb there is a bombardment of neutrons, but the fireball generally eats them up before they get anywhere. Now a neutron bomb uses a pure-fission type of reaction, and has no fission-trigger. It gets its ‘bounce’ from a temperature of 1,000,000 degrees centigrade, generated externally. The explosion releases neutrons which don’t have an electrical charge (therefore atoms don’t repel them) and which travel far and fast until the air absorbs them.
These neutrons penetrate buildings, water, etc., but destroy only living matter, leaving machinery in perfect working order. The Tokwe explosion was of a small tactical-size neutron weapon, although, for security reasons, it was isolated within the pretence of a huge H-explosion. Neutron bombs do not use expensive or rare ingredients and therefore information about them is as eagerly sought by the smaller powers as by the larger.
