by Ben Bova
But because of the failure of the two supply ships to Mars, Discovery didn’t have enough fuel or supplies for the return trip to Earth. The plan to rendezvous with the supply ships and bring the crew home would never be realized.
Millions of miles away, on the upper floor of the administrative area of the DAF, General Mitchell met with a cadre of DOE, national lab, and military personnel. Although the conference room was not in close proximity to the half-megaton nuclear devices parked in secure vaults three stories below, no windows adorned the room—or any other area in the DAF. Three stories high and made of rebar-enforced, nuclear-pedigreed concrete, the DAF stood out like Ayers Rock in the Nevada desert.
General Mitchell went around the room, going over his checklist in methodical fashion. “Device status?” The complex, intricately manufactured 560-kiloton nuclear weapon was reduced to being known as the device.
An Asian woman looked up from her laptop. “All three green. Final recommendations from the selection jury will be presented to you and Administrator Lewis next week.”
Mitchell moved to the next person sitting at the table. “The hole?”
“Infrastructure and diagnostics ready in the bore hole. Orthogonal tunnels for the strap-on science experiments are green.”
“Water?”
“Green. Purification verified and ready to flood the tunnel.”
Mitchell nodded. “Plug?”
A skinny man in coveralls stood. “Yellow, because the plug’s not yet in place. But the last acoustic testing is complete—no flaws, General. The titanium carbide plug is being transported to the NTS on one of the old shuttle transport 747s and will be ready for insertion as soon as it arrives.” He looked down at his notes. “The steel plate is on-site and ready to be moved over the hole and welded to the plug on notice.”
Mitchell turned to a woman wearing a King Soopers grocery jacket, the only person who seemed out of place in the government-dominated room. “Supplies.”
“Packaged and prepositioned, ready to be moved once the plate is in place, General. I’ve got slightly over eleven kilotons, each having their position set within fractions of a centimeter, both horizontally and vertically. The final height will be forty-five meters, just under the surface of the aeroshell. But you’ll have to pray we don’t go to war in the next six months. We’ve diverted all of USTRANSCOM’s strategic supplies for the next year.”
Mitchell grunted and turned to the next person. “Public affairs?”
* * *
Two thousand miles away to the east, General Mitchell’s boss sat in front of a classified Congressional special program’s oversight panel, defending the expenditure of millions of dollars of “black,” or special-access, funds. During the hearing, she didn’t exactly lie—the Congress oversaw the nation’s SAP, or special access programs with keen oversight, and this sometimes appeared the only way that urgent, nationally important programs such as the B-2, the Corona spy satellite, and the Osama bin Laden special ops missions could be successfully run. So when asked point-blank if this black program Heather was conducting at the DAF would result in a new nuclear warhead, Heather could honestly say no—it would merely provide the nation with a new capability.
But it was a huge new capability, she began.
She spelled out that the new capability could launch huge quantities of supplies to the Moon and planets, and that it would open up a new era for space travel. But in her mind that was mincing words—there was one catch to this huge new capability, and it wasn’t a small one.
When the committee looked at her quizzically, Heather drew in a breath and started explaining just what it took to accomplish that.
* * *
Heather’s G-650 greased to a landing on the ten-thousand-foot-long runway at the Nevada Test Site. The sleek white business jet looked out of place as it taxied past dusty metal sheds and squat, brown concrete buildings.
A black suburban with a Department of Energy license plate raced up to the jet as the G-650 pulled next to a metal staircase. As the engines whined down, Heather tapped down the stairs into the waiting staff car, her ear glued to her smartphone. Final arrangements were being coordinated back in Washington, and Heather received up-to-the-minute appraisals.
She’d briefed Congress’s special programs oversight committee just hours before at the closed meeting, speaking to two senior senators and representatives, representing both parties. When she fully revealed the capability and purpose of Thunderwell, the room went deathly silent.
But only for a few minutes.
After all the uproar, thank goodness only one Congressperson had violently objected, so she left the hearing unscathed.
It had been her plan all along to fully brief Congress on the ultimate purpose of Thunderwell: to build a nuclear-bomb-driven steam piston that would hurl over eleven kilotons of supplies to Mars. But she didn’t fully brief them until today, when the device was complete and ready to be used.
Now they knew. And as Heather’s car drove up to the NTS command post, the oversight committee was waiting to brief the President in the White House Situation Room. If she’d timed things right, she’d sit down at the control room’s console just as the classified video-teleconference with the White House began.
General Mitchell stood as Heather walked into the cool, dark command center. In the middle of a cluster of identically drab buildings, situated at the top of a barren hill, the command post’s interior had been dramatically updated from the last time it had been used in the early 1990s, when underground testing of nuclear weapons had started winding down. Since that time, non-nuclear and radioactive equation-of-state tests were conducted at the site, but those experiments did not rank high enough in priority to merit updating the old facility. The round-off error from the Thunderwell budget more than paid for the installation of new fiber-optic controls, oversized HDTV screens, and an updated multileveled command center.
Tens of windows were open on the HD displays, showing various camera shots throughout the test site: at the bottom of the hole, the 560-kiloton nuclear device, eerily sitting in crystal-clear, deionized water; an arm-thick bundle of fiber optics that spread out to the thousands of sensors—neutral and charged particle, X-ray, heat, optical, overpressure, density, temperature, laser, and RF imaging—that permeated the test site; the explosively driven blast doors situated near the surface, just under the titanium plug; orthogonal views of the massive thirty-meter diameter, one-meter-thick steel plate sitting on top of the titanium plug; the forty-five-meter-high composite aeroshell enveloping the plate, looking like a huge stubby nosecone jutting up from the desert floor; and several angles of the site viewed from a hundred meters to ten kilometers away. The ground surrounding the hole was deserted, void of movement.
A quiet hum of voices filled the command center, as if no one wanted to raise their voice as they ran through checklists.
Suddenly, the center screen blinked and a red list of tri-graphs appeared at the top of the display as the view focused on the President, surrounded by the Congressional oversight committee. The President looked shocked as two senators exchanged heated words.
Heather cleared her throat. “Mr. President, I assume you’ve been briefed—”
The President turned to the screen. “What the hell is going on?” His features grew larger as he leaned toward the camera. “You’ve been building your own nuclear weapon without my or Congress’s approval, and now you want to break the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty? Who do you think you are? Do you realize that detonating this device and launching that plate might cause several nations on this planet to assume they’re under nuclear attack, and launch a retaliatory strike against American cities?”
“Mr. President,” interrupted Heather, “as Administrator of your National Nuclear Security Agency, I not only have the legal right, but I have a sworn duty to ensure the safety and surety of the nation’s nuclear stockpile. I have not designed a new weapon. I have merely appropriated one of our nuclea
r devices due for destructive testing and have instrumented it so as to fully understand the detonation physics in the event that you authorize an underground test…”
“Underground test? Are you insane? You’ve got ten thousand tons of metal sitting on top of that high-tech blowhole. It’s the world’s largest cannonball!”
“It’s not a cannonball, sir. It’s over eleven kilotons of supplies, mostly food and water—the titanium plug and steel platform are less than a third of the total weight.”
The President looked icy. “Don’t split hairs with me. If that thing detonates and something goes wrong, we could find ourselves in the middle of a nuclear war.”
“State Department notification of the underground test is ready to be sent simultaneously to the United Nations, and to the world’s nuclear powers, sir. Since the US has not fully ratified the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, we fully reserve the right to conduct an underground test to ensure the safety and surety of our stockpile. As such, NNSA’s legal team has delivered a Presidential Finding for you to sign to authorize the test so that we’ll have the legal framework to proceed…”
“This is not an underground test, it’s a nuclear-driven projectile! The test hole will vent radioactive material worldwide. Are you crazy?”
Her hands tightly clutched the wooden table as she struggled to remain calm. “Blast doors located under the plug will slam shut just after the plug is accelerated up, preventing anything but superheated steam from escaping from the hole. This technique was perfected near the end of the underground nuclear test campaign in the early 1990s.
“Mr. President, this program will accomplish three high-interest items. First, you’ll confirm the safety and surety of our nation’s stockpile, showing the world the remaining nuclear weapons you are responsible for are still a viable deterrence, and will only detonate when you want them to detonate; second, you’ll provide a highly visible rescue of our stranded astronauts, demonstrating to the world your commitment to use American ingenuity to rescue international astronauts, even as far away as the orbit of Mars.” She paused.
The President waited for a moment, his face icily rigid. He leaned into the screen. “And the third high-interest item I’ll accomplish?”
“As far as demonstrating your commitment to finally signing the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty,” said Heather tiredly, “you’ll not only have a reason to do it, but you’ll have a scapegoat to haul up before the international court. Me.”
* * *
Colonel Lewis moved from the lander and stepped lightly into the Martian soil. Red landscape spread out before him, dotted with rubble, rocks, and what looked like a ridge of rugged mountains in the distance. They’d chosen a landing spot by the pole, where evidence of winter ice had been pinpointed. With any luck, they’d be able to harvest ice for water, and perhaps crack the water for oxygen. Realistically they knew the chance was small and their outlook was bleak; but by attempting to explore and perform what scientific experiments they could, at least they would be busy … and push away the certainty of death for as long as they could.
* * *
The President acquiesced.
Grudgingly.
* * *
The countdown proceeded well within the time calculated by the astrodynamicists. The time of launch was set to when the Earth’s rotation brought the Thunderwell site into the plane of the ballistic trajectory to Mars. It was like setting off a gigantic cannon, and the initial velocity, angle of the hole to the vertical (with a deviation less than femto-radians), and even planetary gravitational influences, all had to be precisely aligned so that the supplies would hit Mars. It was a modern version of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. But instead of a nineteenth-century gun launching a bullet to the lunar surface, this was a nuclear-weapon steam piston accelerating eleven thousand tons of supplies to Mars.
The entire Nevada Test Site worked with well-oiled precision, whatever excitement present muted by the knowledge that even with all their attention to detail and exacting preparation, stuff still happened, and the device might not pop off as planned.
Nuclear tests had failed unexpectedly during the heyday of nuclear testing, and it might happen again. But instead of just moving on to another test of an exotic nuclear weapon design—enhanced neutron production, electromagnetic pulse generator, extremely small yield, or even a ground-shattering earth mover—this failure would be the last nuclear shot ever attempted.
The quiet only magnified what everyone knew: that this was the last option to rescue six astronauts on Mars who had no other chance.
* * *
“Sixty seconds, General. STRATCOM acknowledges all declared nuclear countries—the UK, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, and France—have been appraised.” The controller coughed. “And a courtesy notification has been sent to the IAEA, Israel, Brazil, Japan, Iran, and North Korea. This is your last chance to abort.”
Mitchell glanced to his left at Heather. The Administrator stood silently watching the array of screens as if she hadn’t heard. Her arms crossed, muted light reflected from her face. No emotion hinted that her husband’s fate depended on the wildly improbable and unconventional delivery of supplies, or that her personal fate was dictated in breaking the as yet unratified International Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty.
General Mitchell nodded to the young female controller when Heather remained mute. The digital clock ticked past the fifteen-second mark. “Carry on.” He turned back to the screens. Ten seconds.
* * *
It took place in less than a second.
Electrons trickled into explosive wires that detonated an array of lens-shaped explosives. The precisely assembled array of incredibly symmetric high-explosives—especially manufactured by Los Alamos National Laboratory—detonated in fine-tuned precision.
Within milliseconds, the conventional, non-nuclear explosives compressed the plutonium pit that served as the kernel for the atomic cascade, resulting in a runaway nuclear detonation. Gamma rays streamed out of the nuclear explosion, racing into the ten-meter-radius tunnel and interacting with everything in their path. Water instantly converted to superheated, high-pressure steam and an enormous shock wave radiated outward.
Simultaneously, electrical signals ignited other explosive charges that started the massive blast doors at the top of the tunnel to start to slam shut. If successful, the heavy doors would close just after the steam had propelled the plug and steel plate into the atmosphere at over twelve kilometers a second, but before any radioactive debris from the blast vented into the atmosphere. Timing was of the essence, and microsecond timescales mattered in balancing critical hydrodynamic phenomena.
Throughout the confines of the mile-deep tunnel—with nowhere to go but up—the superheated steam pushed against the titanium carbide plug that sealed the top of the bore hole. As if powered by a supersonic ram, the steam accelerated the plug against the steel plate.
A roiling, smoke-laden column erupted from the Nevada desert, looking like a giant Roman candle as the aeroshell accelerated up, blasting through ten kilometers in less than a second.
But within milliseconds after the initial seventy-two thousand gees imparted by the nuclear-powered steam piston, a small, asymmetric distribution of mass caused a pressure differential across the steel plate. Exceeding the von Mises yield criteria, the growing difference in pressure created a fracture line. Within eight seconds, as the supplies burst through the first one hundred kilometers of viscous Earth atmosphere, the plate cracked into seven discrete parts. The aeroshell fractured and was peeled off the plate of supplies.
The plate’s center of mass still headed for Mars, but slowly breaking off into distinct chunks, the supplies now resembled more of a shotgun blast than a single bag of manna.
In the meantime, radioactive steam, wall debris, and other material not captured by the explosive doors that slammed shut at the top of the bore hole, spewed into the atmosphere. Carried by easterly winds and the jet stream, the contamin
ated material drifted toward the most populated parts of the US.
Senate Hearing Room, Russell Office Building
The small hearing room was crammed with people. Staffers stood against the back wall as news media crouched on the floor in a no-man’s-land between the senators and the table where Heather and her deputies were seated.
The chairman pounded on the gavel. He leaned over the wooden desk that separated him and his congressional colleagues from the NNSA personnel. The murmuring silenced as the chairman looked at Heather over the top of his glasses. “This report from your own agency, Madam Administrator, indicates that more radiation was released into the atmosphere by this Thunderwell disaster than from Three Mile Island. Now what do you say about that?”
Heather straightened and leaned into her microphone. “Considering that the radiation level outside the gate to Three Mile Island was just over the amount of radiation you’d get from flying over the Rocky Mountains, a factor of ten times that amount is still less activity than the Japanese nuclear release from the 2012 tsunami.”
The chairman reddened. “I can hold you in contempt, Madam Administrator.”
“I meant no disrespect, Senator. You asked what I had to say about the comparison of radioactivity released from Three Mile Island. The fact is that the containment vessel at TMI did a remarkable job of doing what it was designed to do, and as such the radiation levels near the facility were relatively small. In the same manner, the blast doors at the Nevada Test Site, although not perfect, did an extraordinary job of containing a nuclear blast of over a half-megaton—and produced far, far less fallout than any aboveground test the US ever conducted.”
“I wouldn’t call the meltdown of a nuclear power plant benign, madam.”
“Compared to a nuclear explosion, it is, Senator.”