Nobody interrupted, so the physicist continued.
“The geometry of bringing two smaller, non-critical masses together to form an instantaneous critical mass, thereby initiating the spontaneous chain reaction required to release a small part of the energy within the atoms of U235, would in itself, be a remarkable piece of science…”
“And yet,” Santa Anna sighed, “the English have, it seems, solved all of these problems and produced, we think, judging by the test grounds in northern Sonora, a significant number of viable atomic weapons?”
“Yes, but they have the resources of an Empire that encompasses a quarter of the globe, General. Moreover, respectfully, they possess a centuries-old scientific tradition of free inquiry, that we do not. They also have access to Uranium, in small quantities in the British Isles and New England, and in significant deposits in Australia and Southern Africa, and the pre-existing, well-established advanced, large-scale, well-established academic, technical and industrial infrastructure in place to expeditiously implement such a huge project. True, the cost to them would be enormous; but in comparison to ourselves, that cost would only equate to a relatively small drain on their overall wealth.” The physicist hesitated. “I would guess that the English have been able to keep their atomic research secret simply by hiding its costs in major military and civilian infrastructure and research and development projects. We have made great strides in the last few years but our universities and industry were constrained by the dogmas of the Mother Church even while I was studying for my first degree, and in the fields of the natural sciences and other realms of pure theoretical and experimental inquiry, we remain in many respects, like babes in arms, children taking their first steps into the future in comparison with our friends in New England and Northern Europe.”
Santa Anna sat back and looked, thoughtfully to Hernando de Soto before again focusing on the scientist.
“You intimated to Don Rodrigo that you were afraid that the English might already have progressed beyond the testing of ‘rudimentary’ devices, Professor?”
Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena swallowed hard and nodded.
“Yes, in testing the samples brought back from the ‘test’ area, I detected traces of radioactive isotopes which my theoretical studies indicate ought not to be present in the environment after the testing of a U235 device. Specifically, I suspect that at least one device employing a product of Uranium enrichment called Plutonium may have been tested in Sonora.”
“And why is this particularly worrying?” The President asked, his face a little ashen.
“Because using Plutonium it is conceivable to produce a fusion reaction, much like that in the heart of our Sun, Your Honour. It infers a technology which, if combined with that of a U235 bomb,” he stumbled after the inadvertent use of that word, “might make possible the development of a weapon which could destroy the largest city on the planet and obliterate everything around it for ten, twenty, or possibly fifty miles in every direction.”
The physicist’s thoughts had already moved on.
He was thinking of the papers – a steady stream, a drip, drip, drip of them – on ionising radiation-related subjects published in the last decade in the British Isles, and several, fascinating ones which had been published under the auspices of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Until a week or so ago, he had complacently imagined the majority of these fascinating papers must have been based on the classified research carried out by the great powers back in the 1950s and early 1960s, and perhaps deliberately de-classified in the wake of the Submarine Treaty which, in effect, abolished the building of submarines and the development of under-water technologies in its title; but more importantly, had supposedly halted all bar theoretical atomic research either for civil usages, other than for medical applications such as x-ray or imaging, and banned outright all military applications of nuclear science.
He had wondered about the datasets many of those papers had been based on, and assumed that the Europeans must have had access to animal testing experiments prior to the signing of the Treaty in 1966. However, now two things struck him, both like unexpected blows to the guts.
One, either or both of the British or German atomic programs must have been far more advanced by 1966 than either of the parties had admitted; and two, that the English at least, must have continued to develop their program in secret in the intervening twelve years.
“When Don Rodrigo spoke to me,” he said, picking up the threads of his racing, jostling fears, astonished that the first relatively short telephone conversation with his esteemed university colleague had only been seven days ago, “I explained the things that I would need to look for to confirm, or rule out, the provisional conclusions he had already drawn from visiting the Ojo del Diablo district, and the areas to which the local Indian population had taken him, where reported pathologies and fragmentary morphological evidence suggested possible contamination by non-naturally occurring ionising radiation. The literature I have read on the research available on the radioactive pathology of mammalians is, surprisingly, remarkably informative, if somewhat speculative. Nonetheless, the mechanisms in play are schoolboy stuff, basic high school physics, really…”
Don Rodrigo caught his colleague’s eye and glanced at the nearest wall clock as if to say: “President de Soto and General Santa Anna are busy men and their time is very precious!”
“I apologise,” the physicist stuttered, “as my beautiful wife keeps telling me, I am not a very practical man. I tend to digress at the drop of a hat…”
Hernando de Soto smiled patiently, paternally.
“What you have told us thus far is most thought-provoking professor. Pray continue.”
“Yes, thank you, Your Honour. It was suggested that I stick to layman’s language. That is hard, the subject is complex and there are many variables.”
“We understand, Professor,” Santa Anna confirmed, a little distantly as if his thoughts were suddenly hundreds of miles away with his troops in West Texas.
“Anyway, once I’d spoken to Don Rodrigo, I knew what to look for. If, that was, the Sonora site was indeed a testing range for atomic bombs…”
He had said that word again.
Employed the plural form of it…
And he was about to say it again, and he suspected, again and again in the next few minutes, days, weeks and years.
He took a deep breath.
“There are likely to be three relatively long-lived isotopic substances, isotopes, if you like from the detonation of an atomic bomb employing U235. There are other ‘fallout’ isotopes injurious to human health, and to the general ecology of local and distant sites from an atomic explosion, or more accurately, a significant fission event. In any event, there is nothing our present state of medical knowledge can do to mitigate, or to alleviate the effects of irradiation caused by the numerous exotic short-lived isotopic fission by-products, the majority of which would already be present only in unimaginably minute quanta by now, and therefore undetectable to the equipment available to us. So, I will disregard those. As I say, there are three particular isotopic markers, or contaminants, which are identifiable and tend to linger in the tissue of living mammals, and or, to collect in the fibre of the local flora and fauna.”
A part of Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena wanted to believe that he was not having to explain this, any of it to the two most powerful men in México, especially not in the middle of a war with an enemy who might, at a whim, start wiping the cities of his homeland off the face of the Earth, much in the fashion of an angry god.