The Trinity Paradox Read Free

beer or two Jeff would argue that the real fear now lay in the second-generation players in the nuclear game, Iraq, South Africa, Libya, North Korea. Simple nuclear weapons technology was well-known and available, and if not for the extraordinary difficulties in extracting fissionable material such as uranium-235 or plutonium, any tin-pot dictator could make his own Bomb. By this point in his conversation, Jeff’s voice was usually rising. Any resourceful terrorist could put together a “crude” Scotch-tape-and-bubble-gum bomb that had a yield larger than the one dropped on Hiroshima back in 1945.
    Elizabeth agreed it was only a lucky fluke that the United States and the Soviet Union had survived their nuclear adolescence; she wasn’t confident that every other country would be so well-behaved. She wished the things had never been invented in the first place. But how could you close Pandora’s Box after the lid had been blown sky-high?
    Weapons scientists, like the ones at Los Alamos, continued to develop new methods of destruction, opening new Pandora’s boxes so that all generations to follow would have more and more to fear. The designers kept at their work, even after disasters like the recent capacitor accident, even if it required them to ignore the threat to human lives.
    The official Los Alamos press release implied that nothing serious had happened. When the Challenger had exploded, NASA shut down for over a year—but when a major weapons program went wrong, the work barely paused. According to the news, a safety inspection and official inquiry would be scheduled “in the near future.”
    It was just like the cover-up in Los Angeles. Ted Walblaken had been an old friend when Elizabeth had worked the books for United Atomics. But she had left the giant defense contractor right after Ted’s death, after United Atomics tried to assure the press, and Ted’s fellow employees, that it could not be proved a work-related radiation exposure had caused his cancer.
    That had been a turning point for her. She felt as if someone had shaken her awake from a nightmare she hadn’t even known she was having.
    And now this Los Alamos test was scheduled, hardly a week after five people had died in a lab accident. Shouldn’t all research have been shut down and reassessed? Nobody seemed to care.
    Elizabeth had stood in the Santa Fe office of the United Conscience Group, her fingers clenched around the newspaper clipping. The office had little furniture, a phone and a few desks, a poster on the wall showing the burned corpse of a Nagasaki victim sprawled above the slogan, “Technical Excellence Brought to You by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.” The United Conscience Group looked like a fly-by-night company in a low-rent office, but they had been active since the Gulf War.
    Elizabeth scowled. If you could call this “active.”
    Dave, Tim, and Marcia all reacted with suitable outrage at the news of the lab accident, then they made the appropriate “You’re not serious!” response when Elizabeth told them that the other weapons tests were going to continue on schedule at Los Alamos. She knew what would happen next.
    Dave rubbed his hands together. “All right, people, we’ve got to get moving on this! Let’s contact the local radio stations, Albuquerque too, to see if we can get on the air. Tim, why don’t you draft a few letters to the editor? Marcia, you want to draw up some flyers and get them printed? We’ll have to go out and hit the street corners. I’ll get on the phone and round up all the help we can get. Let’s nip this in the bud—time to make ourselves felt!”
    Rah, rah, Elizabeth thought, then left the office before Dave could assign her some insipid duties. Letters to the editor? Flyers? Yeah, that would sure make people tremble in their seats and change the world; these guys must have thought they were back in the sixties. The United Conscience Group had never done anything but talk, and as the