The world is changing. The power of knowledge is in its application.
Chapter 2 Yellowstone
It’s shocking how little time is required to take a volcanic system from being quiet and sitting there to the edge of an eruption.
Hannah Shamloo, Geologist
Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, The Superblock
1046 Days to Portal Closure
Catherine Ulam wasn’t impressed with the repetition of how “cut your throat before reading” classified the briefing was. As a Senior Researcher in Device Design in the premiere nuclear weapons design establishment in the world, she’d heard it all before. This one had the smell of a military black project. The briefer was in anonymous civies, but she pegged him for an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel.
The people at the table were senior key players, herself and her right hand Lee Worthington from Device Design, Tory Ewing and Hal Snow from Energetic Materials, the conventional explosives side of the house, and the Director of Livermore.
She got impressed, fast. “The E-beam came out of the DARPA project to exploit the physics data in the Portal data package. It’s a millimetre-wave spectrum MASER beam that disrupts the nitrate chemical bond and causes any nitrate based explosive or propellant to burn in a low order reaction.”
Cathy was a world class expert on nuclear weapons design. This beam was outside her knowledge base, but it was clearly a serious problem. The detonation train of a nuclear device required shaped changes of chemical explosive crafted to micrometer precision to detonate with microsecond timing. Interfering with that by even the tiniest amount meant a fizzle instead of an explosion.
Still, she wasn’t going to flip out just yet. “Surely, the casing offers some protection?”
“That, Ms. Ulam, is what we need to know very urgently, from both your side of the house and Energetic Materials.” The briefer gave a nod to Tory Ewing and Hal Snow.
He flipped up a video and played it. A demolition charge, a rocket launcher, and an air-to-air missile were hit by the beam, and all three burned like Yule logs. “Initial tests indicate it propagates along surfaces.”
Lee tensed beside her. He knew as much about the casings of nuclear devices as she did about the devices themselves. He’d just seen a big problem.
“We can conduct simulations or hardware tests. Hardware tests would be more definitive.” The Director looked dubious, and Cathy knew why. Getting permission for hardware tests took a lot of sign-offs.
The briefer slid an envelope down the table. “Authorization from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Whatever you need, except time.”
Closed Test Range #2, Area 51, Nevada
1036 Days to Portal Closure
Cathy hit the switch, the beam generator whined briefly, and the cone-shaped warhead leaked flames around the bottom seam where it met the warhead bus. This one was an exact duplicate of one of the latest Russian warheads.
No need for a postmortem. It was exactly the same as the last thirteen tests. She typed out a brief summary of the test result, walked down range to the remains of the warhead and took some pictures. The warhead bus that contained the detonation package was junk, and a quick check from underneath the warhead casing confirmed the simulated fissionables were scorched but intact.
She walked the kilometre back to the range hut where the beam generator was, added a little to her report and uploaded the pictures. There would eventually be a much longer report in the standard bureaucratic format expressing her three pages in about 50, but the bottom line would be identical. 100% kill rate.
She added a comment about the beam generator, a hay-wired test rig with an output power of a few watts. A properly built one with an output of a few kilowatts would reach Earth orbit without breaking a sweat.
The secure hard line phone in the range hut rang. It was Lee Worthington. “What have you got, Cathy?”
“100% kill rate. Ours, Russian, Chinese, North Korean.” Cathy said.
Lee was running the tests which would, hopefully, find a shield material against the beam. “What have you got?”
“Immersing it in nitric acid worked. Otherwise, 100% failure rate.” Lee replied.
She sighed. I just became obsolete, and my life’s work has just gone down the toilet. “Write it up, Lee, and we’ll put it up the food chain today. They’ve been pressuring us for an answer. Nothing says they have to like what they get.”
Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, The Superblock
1002 Days to Portal Closure
Catherine was conflicted, and bored. She hadn’t needed the official reaction to know what the decision from the test results was. Her current workload, what little there was of it, was ample proof. The end of the Balance of Terror was good. Catherine Ulam as obsolete as a flint knapper was a bit hard to bear.
She ran her hands across her shoulder length brown hair and made a mental note to get it cut and coloured to hide the grey. Her desk was already neat, but she put a pen back in the holder.
Quit stalling. Cathy mustered up her willpower and got to work. She pulled up her report on “Optimal Methods for Dismantling the B-61 Warhead”, went through it again and corrected two typos, then sent it off to the Assistant Associate Director of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, her department head. She was sure it was accurate, which was about as hard as getting into trouble in a Tijuana bar after dark.
This was make-work of the purest ray serene. Livermore’s Fission Design Group was in the business of designing and testing nuclear weapons, not telling Tech Sergeants with screwdrivers how to dismantle them. Catherine had spent half her life in the Laboratory, and now she was spending the remainder on unravelling everything she had built.
There were rumours around about a major RIF as soon as the bureaucracy could coordinate both hands sufficiently to find its ass. It didn’t bother her overmuch. She was close to retirement, and she would have her pension. She was worried for the younger people, who still had careers in front of them. Working on the black side in Livermore meant a big highly classified hole in one’s CV.
She had her own cure for boredom. Livermore had copied from Google the policy of letting people off the leash once in a while, because they came up with unexpectedly useful ideas. She opened up the Oddments folder. In the course of her many projects, she had accumulated a collection of personally interesting problems she’d never had time to work on, until now.
More or less at random, she clicked on the Yellowstone folder. People who obsessed about the horrors of a nuclear war were very good at ignoring how Mother Nature could kick mankind’s ass around the block when it came to planetary disaster. The Yellowstone Caldera had inflicted a whole series of such disasters on the planet in the course of its 18 million year history.
She was quite willing to stipulate the very small chance of a super-volcano eruption in her lifetime, or in this millennium. Catherine was accustomed to making plans for low-probability catastrophes. If this one did happen, it would compete very well with the results of a full out nuclear war. It would bury the heartlands of the United States under metres of volcanic ash, cause decades of volcanic winter across the face of the entire globe and poison the oceans. Whether humanity survived or not, civilization certainly wouldn’t.
She would bet her pension on politicians and bureaucrats spending a lot of time in hand-wringing and denial until the prospect of catastrophe was was so close they couldn’t ignore it. What would be needed then was a fast, dirty solution. It didn’t need to be perfect, just better than the alternative.
The magma rising from the Earth’s core had to build pressure high enough, fast enough, to make the rock above fail all at once. It had happened before, so Catherine would leave the vulcanologists to argue about the why and how.
From the vertical profile of the Caldera, a comparatively narrow hole through the rock overburden would produce a small, relatively harmless volcano to relieve the pressure. It would play Hell with the tourist trade in Yellowstone Park, but nothing came free.
Drilling down there with a conventional drill rig wouldn’t do it. Even if the technology was up to it, it would still take a lot of time, the one thing there was never enough of in a crisis, and produce a hole too small to be useful. A nuclear device had no such limits.
She had at her disposal a considerable body of prior art concerning underground nuclear detonations, validated by data from hundreds of actual tests conducted prior to the Test Ban Treaties. There were trade-offs. Scale factor, the degree to which the energy of the event was concentrated in one direction, mattered because it determined the depth and diameter of the hole created, and dictated how deep the device had to be buried to contain the event and prevent release of radiation. She needed a hole wide enough to allow enough magma to come up to actually release the pressure, which required the right balance of device yield, scale factor and depth of emplacement. More than one might be required, too, so she had those trade-offs to consider.
Catherine worked away happily until lunch time, keeping a working document as she went. It would, of course, be classified, but she would take the time required to mark up the individual sections when she could apply the standard test of damage to national security if it got out. It would probably wind up as SECRET, and she could sanitize it to CONFIDENTIAL if she ever wanted to take the trouble.
She spent most of the afternoon doing “happy vs. glad” revisions on the B-61 report, by email with the new AAD of her section. He was a new low among the occupants of the position. Unusually, he hadn’t come up through the ranks but had been parachuted in from elsewhere in the bureaucracy, from Washington if rumour spoke true. He was already pegged among the cubicles as having trouble telling the difference between a neutron and a proton, and seemed to think fiddling with the wording of a report he didn’t understand would somehow demonstrate he was in control.
Catherine wasn’t unduly concerned when she was called to the AAD’s office the following Friday, first thing in the morning. It had the flavour of being called on the carpet, but she was caught up on everything, so she wasn’t worried. He probably wants to scold me about paper clip usage, so he can feel important.
She walked straight into the AAD’s office. He was at his desk, but he wasn’t alone. There were two serious looking men in suits by his desk. She wasn’t invited to take a chair. She took one anyway.
“I did not tell you to be seated.” The AAD tried for icy intimidation, but achieved petty spite.
“I will forgive your lapse of manners.” Catherine was underwhelmed. He needed to polish his act – a lot – to intimidate her. She waited for him to drop whatever bombs he thought he had.
One of the silent suited men put a hard copy printout on the desk in front of her and flashed a badge and an ID. “Ms. Ulam, I am Special Agent Arnesson of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Do you recognize this document?”
She looked down at it and read the title. “A Method for Relieving the Pressure of the Yellowstone Caldera”, and she certainly did recognize it. The original was sitting in her workstation’s folder.
“Yes, I do. I wrote it.” Even FBI agents should be able to figure out what my name under the title means.
The AAD weighed in. “I did not authorize you to pursue this direction of research, and had I known I would have forbidden it. By what right did you conduct this research?”
Catherine had heard manufactured outrage before, and the AAD wasn’t very good at it. “Policy Directive 24B authorizes Senior Researchers, which I am, to spend up to 20% of their time on personally selected projects consonant with the mission of the Laboratory. This is one of those projects.”
The AAD sputtered with outrage. “I never authorized such a policy!”
Idiot. Does he think Livermore sprang into existence the day before he walked in the office door? Of course, reading his own policy handbook would have strained his tiny little brain.
The FBI agent held up a hand. “None of which is of any interest to us. What we are here to investigate is how this document wound up on Wikileaks.”
“What? Are you out of your mind?” She burst out.
The secure networks at Livermore were very secure indeed. By no conceivable human error could it have leaked by accident.
“No, I’m not, Ms. Ulam. We need to ask you some questions. If you could come with me, please?”
Catherine got up out of her chair without argument. The polite sounding request was nothing of the sort. The wrong answers to those questions could see her taken out in handcuffs and put her in Federal prison for a very long time.
She half expected to be taken out of the Superblock down to some FBI office, but instead she was taken down to one of the conference rooms. She hung grimly on to the fact she was not the one who had leaked the document.
Over the next hours, her resolution was tried to the maximum. She lost count of the number of ways an accusatory “Why did you leak this document?” could be phrased, including the ones implying she was part of a conspiracy and demanding names of her co-conspirators.
She quickly ran out of variations on “I didn’t, and I wasn’t part of any conspiracy.”
They played a couple of riffs on, “Did you think it was unclassified?”
She shot it in the head as such idiocy deserved. “I was talking about the effects of nuclear devices, to model which I used classified software and data. Just the suggestion in an open forum would have the usual idiots freaking out and rioting in the streets. Of course it was classified. The question was, how high?”
When Catherine was faced with a challenge she got dogged and stubborn. It was what made her good at her job, and it was now in full play. These bastards could sweat her as much as they wanted and ignore the truth as long as they wanted. She wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction.
There were some occasional intelligent questions salted in among the assumptions of guilt. They had her look at the document. It was the version from two days ago, which was different from the one now sitting in her personal folder. In an actual flash of technical knowledge, one of them asked whether it was possible to download a file to a stick or a disk. The answer was a flat no, except for one authorized section which did nothing else. Of course, they couldn’t be bothered to check their records, or the printer logs.
There was a long string of questions about why the document didn’t have classification markings on it, as was absolutely required even for internal distribution. She ran out of variations on “It was an internal working document, still in progress.”
They asked over and over where it had gone, and to whom. She got very tired of repeating “Nowhere, and no one.”
In another flash of technical knowledge, one of them asked, “Who had access to the file on the networks?”
“Me, the AAD, and the system administrators.” She had to repeat it a lot of times, again.
They tried some variants on “good cop, bad cop”. Catherine had watched cop shows and was long past any regard for or trust in what any of these people might say.
She had long since lost track of time when another agent came into the room, pulled aside the senior of her inquisitors, whispered in his ear, then left again. The senior agent came back to the table. “Ms. Ulam, you are free to go.”
Catherine was distantly aware her smart move was to get up and leave while the leaving was good, but the anger she had been building up through this whole long ordeal needed some outlet. “So, the winds of expediency have changed and you found some other sacrificial victim. Or do you just need more time to manufacture evidence?”
The senior agent looked patient. “Ms. Ulam, I appreciate you have been through a bad time and you’re upset. We are actually not the arrogant idiots Hollywood so delights to portray. We have a difficult job to do, and we do it as best we can. I would advise you to go home and take some time to decompress.”
It was the one sensible thing she had heard from this collection of boneheads all this long day. She slammed the door behind her and swiped her way through the security checkpoints out of the building toward the parking lot.
Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, The Superblock
999 Days to Portal Closure
George Frey, the brand new Acting AAD of the Fission Design Group, saw the anger coming off Catherine Ulam like smoke off a block of dry ice. I got the short straw on this mess, so I might as well start shovelling.
He looked up at her from his desk. “Good morning, Ms. Ulam. Thank you for coming to see me.”
“Good morning.” They were both well aware this was the emptiest of superficial courtesies. She had been escorted up to his office by security guards on her arrival at the main entrance.
“I’m George Frey, the new AAD.” He extended his hand.
Ulam looked at his hand for a long moment before she took it. The handshake was perfunctory.
“What happened to the old one?” She looked down at him coldly.
“He was transferred back to Washington, to work on an advisory committee.” George watched her reaction. The cold anger was still there.
“Is he under investigation as well?” she demanded.
“The investigation is ongoing, Ms. Ulam. I really can’t discuss it.” It was all he could say, and it was the truth. The FBI was not given to sharing information about ongoing investigations.
He refrained from pointing out how her uncompromising attitude and undisguised contempt for the FBI agents had not helped the investigation or her own case. It certainly hadn’t made it any easier to defend her. She didn’t need reminding she wasn’t out of the woods, either.
I might as well get to it. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Your clearances are suspended pending the outcome of the FBI investigation.”
“With or without pay.” Ulam knew the rules. If her clearances were suspended, so was her employment.
“Without pay, Ms. Ulam, pending the outcome of the FBI investigation, which hopefully should be soon.” Frey tried to put the best face on it. He’d seen such investigations play out, and soon was a hope rather than a promise.
Frey had pressed hard to keep her working or at least suspend her with pay. In his new position he had the obligation to defend his people, and there were larger concerns as well. He was trying to head off a mass exodus.
The Portal had hit the Laboratory hard, and the whole organization was in flux. The Fission Design Group, and indeed the whole Superblock, was looking at being massively scaled back with the dismantling of the nuclear arsenal. The research into conventional explosives was in a huge state of disarray, too. The bureaucracy was having hard time grasping the idea of nitrate based explosives being obsolete.
He suspected his predecessor had been shoved down the organization’s throat as an opportunity to get him out of Washington to a place where he couldn’t do much damage. He’d done enough, anyway.
What had happened to Ulam had left the whole organization in a mood of ” Will I be next?” The usual symptom of updating CV’s had been supplemented by several outright resignations, accompanied by comments like, “I’d rather be unemployed than in jail.” He had managed to talk all but one of those people into holding off and giving him and the organization a chance, but it would be an ongoing problem.
Such an exodus would be a security nightmare. A lot of pissed-off people out on the street job hunting with their heads stuffed full of classified information was a recipe for security breaches. Trying to keep tabs on them would be a practical impossibility. There were a lot of eyes on Ulam, and if she wasn’t reinstated, or definitely proven to have been the leak, the exodus would start.
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