Goliath

“You just heard Dr. Robert Schwager warn us about how the former Soviet Union’s stockpiles of weapons’ grade plutonium have turned into the equivalent of a third world yard sale, and yet most of you are probably daydreaming about your Philadelphia Eagles winning streak or thinking about what you’ll order for lunch. For God’s sake, people, wake up! Apathy is the world’s greatest killer, so you’d better snap out of it now and smell the sarin, before we wipe ourselves off the face of this goddamn planet.”

Dr. Goode registers the local television cameraman’s lens zooming in from stage right.

“I’ve been invited here this morning to give you a brief overview of the latest doomsday technology, a little something we scientists refer to as ‘pure-fusion weapons.’ You’d think we humans would already be satisfied with our ability to annihilate the world’s population a healthy five thousand times … but no. Now scientists at the United States National Ignition Facility at Livermore, California, and our French counterparts at the Laser Megajoule Facility in Bordeaux are on the brink of testing a new weapon, a real doomsday bomb—one that our politicians in Washington may actually be persuaded to use.

“To understand the power of pure fusion you must first understand the difference between fission and fusion. In the fusion trigger of a conventional hydrogen bomb, uranium 235 absorbs a neutron. Fission occurs when the nucleus energetically breaks apart to produce two smaller nuclei and several neutrons, which go on to split more uranium nuclei. The resultant chain reaction proceeds rapidly, producing an explosion. This fission explosion is what produces the temperature and density necessary to trigger the fusion of deuterium and tritium, the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen.

“Fusion is considerably different than fission. Fusion is a reaction that occurs when two atoms of hydrogen combine or fuse together to form an atom of helium, and a ‘leftover’ neutron, a cousin of what powers the sun. Fusion releases much greater quantities of energy than fission, causing an even larger explosion.”

Dr. Goode scans the crowd, its energy waning. Keep it simple, you’re losing them …

“The key difference in a conventional and a pure-fusion H-bomb is how the explosion is triggered. A pure-fusion bomb doesn’t need fission to engage the explosion. This means plutonium or enriched uranium is not required in the design. The good news, if you can call it that, is that no plutonium means little to no radioactive fallout. The bad news is that the nuclear threshold is greatly lowered, so that a 20-mm bullet could explode like many tons of TNT. The explosive power of many relatively small, pure-fusion devices would be much greater than the same weight of a single conventional hydrogen bomb, and far less expensive.”

A female reporter in the front row stands. “Can you tell us how much greater?”

Dr. Goode frowns. “I’ll give you an example. The atomic bomb our country dropped on Hiroshima generated an amount of energy equivalent to nineteen kilotons or nineteen thousand tons of TNT. Temperatures at the hypocenter, or ground zero, reached seven thousand degrees, with a wind velocity estimated at 980 miles per hour. That blast wave killed most of the people within a half mile radius instantly. That was a mere fifteen-kiloton explosion. The biggest version of the H-bomb generates twenty to fifty megatons, or 50 million tons of TNT, the equivalent of two to three thousand Hiroshima-size bombs. A pure-fusion bomb generates a far greater damage volume per unit weight. It would only take a cluster of half-kiloton pure-fusion bombs to equal the military impact of a thirty-megaton H-bomb. That’s a tenth of a ton of pure-fusion TNT to equal a megaton of the conventional nuke. Let me quantify that for you in another way. If you wanted to wipe out a whole continent’s population … say, that of Europe, the job could feasibly be accomplished using only six to twelve well-placed Trident II (D5) nuclear missiles whose warheads had been converted to a swarm of pure-fusion weapons.”

Gasps from the crowd.

A reporter from the Trenton Times raises his hand. “Dr. Goode, are you saying these pure-fusion bombs already exist?”

“We have the bomb, the key to the technology is in its triggering mechanism. Both the United States and France have been working illegally on the problem for decades. Los Alamos is rumored to be only months away from testing a magnetized target fusion driver. In magnetized target fusion, an initial plasma is created by electromagnetic means. Conventional high explosives then compress the plasma, creating the conditions necessary for pure-fusion ignition.”

Another hand is raised. “Exactly what do you mean by illegally?”