“You forgot the pry bar,” Joe said. “Look, any physicist worth his salt could sit you down and go into the most excruciating detail on how to design and build a nuclear bomb. There is nothing magical about it. It’s just hard to do. But ask one of those same brainiacs what to do if the thing goes haywire and has to be defused, and you know what their reaction would be? They’d try and over engineer what needs to be done. Every damn gadget they had access to would somehow find its way into the process. But RSP ain’t that difficult.”
“RSP?” Sean inquired.
“That’s right. You mainly play with guns and little things that go boom. Render Safe Procedures. It’s EOD — that’s explosive ordnance detail — acrospeak. And RSP for the thing we’re going after does not need any fancy gadgets. I’ve got an ammeter to show me where the current is flowing, a high-speed saw to cut through anything getting in my way, and these babies.”
Sean snickered. “You look like you’re better set up for demolition than defusing.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Huh?”
Joe paused, thinking of what he was about to do very quickly. “I’m going to tell you something that I would definitely go to prison for, but then that would be a waste of space. I’ve already got a death sentence.”
Sean lowered himself to the floor.
“Nineteen Eighty-four, Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, Hotel Flight, Missile number ten.”
“This is the one you told me about on the plane last year,” Sean said.
“I didn’t tell you anything,” Joe corrected him. “You came to your own conclusions from some innocent remarks on my part. This is the real thing, from the old mare’s mouth.”
“ ‘Need to know,’ Anderson,” Sean said with a joking wariness. “The walls might have ears.”
“Then hear this, walls,” Joe said loudly, his tone coming down to continue. “We damn near had a Minuteman Three warhead go off. The LCC got a nonresponsive ‘launch enable’ report, then, before they could check the circuits, they received a ‘launch execute’ light. Now these blue suits were really starting to sweat. The commander of the Ninetieth Strategic Missile Wing called in one of his emergency response teams and sent them, in their APC, to the silo and had them park the damn thing on the lid. If a launch actually occurred, the APC would have fallen in when the blast door slid away and disabled the missile…or so they hoped.
“But there was no launch. The press reported it as a ‘computer malfunction.’ Believable enough, but not the truth.”
“What was?”
“The truth was that the arming package on one of the three warheads zapped out for some reason. Bad inspection and maintenance procedures, we figured out later. About a minute after the APC was parked on top of the silo, the LCC got a ‘missile away’ report. Talk about shitting your pants. Well, there was no missile away, but the computers wouldn’t believe that. You see, our ICBMs have a downlink-only telemetry package on them that transmits back to the LCC, and through them to the associated headquarters, a diagnostic on the warheads for two minutes after launch. By that time the thing should be armed. If it isn’t, then the boys who target the things have to scratch one set of MIRVs from their roster. Not that I ever thought it would matter. I mean, in a nuclear war, a few misses really don’t mean much except to the bean counters who keep track of the megatons.”
“Sustainable war,” Sean said.
“Exactly. They want to know if they have to retarget something if the thing doesn’t arm. Anyway, the computers kept saying that the thing was armed. Well, guess what? It was.”
“No shit, Anderson. You’re serious?”
Joe laughed, thinking back to it. “Those were my words when CINCSAC filled me in on the ‘problem.’ So, I had to go into the silo through an access tunnel and, well, use a little reverse engineering.” Joe spread his hands across the line of hand tools.
“You mean you just took it apart?”
“Took it apart?” Joe parroted, surprised at the question but knowing that he shouldn’t be. The major dealt with precision in his operating methods and was assuming that Joe did the same. “Hell, no. I tore the fucker apart. Cut the wires, broke the explosive lenses into little chunks. Man, I did a job on that thing. And CINCSAC wanted to know why I ‘messed up’ one of his three-hundred-and-thirty-five-KT bombs. Can you believe that? I told him to shove it. He thought he’d have my ass in a sling for destroying his warhead and talking to him like that, but I got a presidential citation — classified, of course — for it, and he got the boot for letting the maintenance schedule on his birds get so slipshod that this could happen.”
Sean laughed quietly, his head shaking and his arms wrapped around his knees where he sat. If anyone could talk to a CINC like that, there was no better candidate for it than Anderson. Only a civilian had a chance of surviving such an egregious breach of etiquette and decorum. Military men, particularly career officers like the major, hated the upper-echelon bullshit that frequently interfered in the execution of what was necessary, but few were willing to trade their uniforms for a few choice words with a bozo wearing brass.
“I would have loved to see that,” Sean said, the last bit of laughter trailing off. “So you figure this one will be armed.”
“It doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Joe answered. He began rolling the tools into the black cloth they lay on. “I’ve got to get to the pit in any case.”
“The pit?”
“The plutonium,” Joe explained, setting the remainder of his gear in the hard case and snapping the lid shut.
“Old Soviet warheads were what we called ‘sealed-pit’ designs. That means there’s no access to the sphere of Plutonium that’s the first-stage core of the thing. The explosive lenses that focus the implosion on it to compress it to supercriticality are sealed, meaning I have to cut or break through them to get the thing out.”
“Out?” Sean said warily.
“Yeah. What did you think, we’d just bring the whole warhead back with us? That thing weighs at least a ton and a half, and from what you’ve told me, I won’t have time to do a surgical removal of the whole thing. This is going to be a crude extraction with no anesthesia, Major.”
The reality of what to do with the thing once it had been neutralized hadn’t hit Sean completely until right then. “And it’s coming back with us.”
“You got it. Just think of it as a big nickel-plated basketball that weighs about as much as ten bowling balls,” Joe said. “The rest of the stuff we leave. It’s of little use without the first stage.”
“I guess I should have taken one of those physics lessons you mentioned,” Sean said.
Joe decided a quick one was in order. “Stage one is the plutonium bomb, in simple terms. Running from stage one is a rod of uranium surrounded by lithium-deuteride and an outer skin of more uranium. Neutrons released when stage one goes supercritical ignite the uranium rod and skin, causing a massive flood of neutrons into the lithium-deuteride assembly. Voila! Fusion. A thermonuclear explosion. That’s the basic course, so don’t go out and try to build your own without more instruction.”
“No problem there,” Sean said. “So you leave the second stage?”
“Right. One reason is that it’s too dangerous to get in to remove the uranium. You see, lithium deuteride is pyrophoric, which means it ignites spontaneously in contact with oxygen. Plutonium is also, but the pit is encased in another material, usually nickel, which isolates it from any pyrophoric reaction. To get to the uranium initiator rod, I’d have to go through the lithium deuteride, and unless you can get me and it into a vacuum chamber, then it ain’t gonna happen. We don’t need that stuff burning.”