Chapter 8:
Explosive Solution?
Jeanne entered the room, seeing all rise as she came in. Still getting used to that. “As you were,” she said to the other four people—Dr. Eva Filipek, secretary of energy, George Green of Defense, Hailey Vanderman of the CIA, and of course Roger; her chief of staff had arranged the meeting. “This is going to be a small brainstorming session as well as an update for us. I’ve got a meeting later this afternoon with the FORT and I hope we’ll have something to present after this.”
FORT, or “Fenrir Oversight Response Team,” was the almost-formal name for the group of national leaders who were in charge of formulating, executing, and coordinating Earth’s response to Fenrir. So far, the major achievement of FORT had been arranging and activating the contact transmission that, even now, was being beamed 24/7 toward the approaching craft. But with no response forthcoming, there was a public and private need for something new, and soon. Jeanne really hoped the USA could find that something.
“Nothing new from our scientific task force?” Secretary of Energy Filipek asked. Her words were spoken with a precision that belied the casual, slightly rumpled appearance that Dr. Filipek habitually affected.
“Nothing, Eva,” Jeanne replied. “And I don’t expect anything new for a while, honestly. Fenrir isn’t close enough for us to get much more information from yet, and they’ve wrung every last bit of intelligence out of what they already have.” She looked over to George Green. “Have you got anything for me?”
The secretary of defense—broad and tall, the very model of “defense”—nodded. “Maybe. Had all our people looking at all the alternatives.”
He brought up a presentation on the conference room screen. “There’s only so many ways to move stuff from Earth orbit to the outer system, where we expect Fenrir to stop. Of the ones we can actually use, they break down into two classes, propellant-based and propellantless systems.
“I’ll take the latter class first. Leaving aside whatever unknown drive system Fenrir uses, propellantless systems work by making use of external forces to move the craft. The flashiest and best known is the old solar sail, used in the IKAROS project and a couple of others as well as from a ton of old science fiction. Basically, it catches and reflects sunlight and because light has momentum, some of that transfers to the sail. Magnetosails use the solar wind rather than light, and there’s a sort of hybrid of those called dusty-plasma sails that use magnetic confinement of reflective dust to make a solar sail that doesn’t have much of a physical component.”
Jeanne nodded; she knew a bit about solar sails, but hadn’t heard of the dusty-plasma version before. “Go on.”
The next slide showed the different propellantless systems with a big red X through them. “Useless for our purposes,” Secretary Green said bluntly. “Even the best ones accelerate at a few centimeters per second at best. They’re slow off the mark and can’t maneuver worth a damn. Oh, in the long run they’ll win any race—they’re going to keep accelerating as long as there’s light or solar wind to move them—but we don’t have the time to wait, and we need something that’s got more potential oomph than a giant space parachute.
“Technically,” he went on, “there’s a few others, such as space elevators or slings that can be used to basically throw your payload to a target, but none of them are practical for us to consider in a timescale smaller than years, and wouldn’t really give us what we want.”
He flicked to the next slide. “So that leaves the propellant-based systems. Conventional rockets are well-known established technology, and with the recent success of private as well as public launch companies there’s been something of a boom of space operations.
“Unfortunately, none of them—neither NASA nor any of the private companies—can really establish a presence in the outer system on a timescale of less than years. Almost all their operations are in LEO, Low Earth Orbit, up to maybe geosynchronous orbit. Getting to the Moon’s a challenge, getting to Mars is a major piece of work. Anything past that? Just not in the cards.”
“So are you saying we have no options for even a rendezvous, let alone anything more . . . forceful?” Jeanne asked.
“Not quite.” George’s usual football-star smile had an edge to it this time. “But we’re going to go out on quite a limb. A radioactive limb.”
“Jesus, George!” Hailey Vanderman’s explosive curse made her jump; Vanderman was usually quiet. “You’re not telling us to drag old Bang-Bang out of storage?”
Green’s smile got wider, and Jeanne raised her eyebrow. “‘Old Bang-Bang’?”
“Back in the days of the fifties and sixties, when Disney was publishing books like Our Friend the Atom,” Vanderman answered, eyeing Green warily, “the DoD played with a lot of ideas for using nuclear energy in areas other than just blowing people up or generating electricity. Project Plowshare, for example—using nukes to dig great big, huge public works projects, like maybe a sea-level canal at Panama about half a mile wide and hundreds of feet deep.
“But then there was Project Orion, which basically proposed that you could drive a spacecraft by lighting off atomic bombs underneath it.” Hailey grinned with an edge of disbelief. “Craziest part of that, though, was that everything we know says it would work.”
“Thanks for the thunder-stealing, Hailey,” Green said, with his fading smile taking a bit of edge off. “Vanderman’s got it right, though, Madam President. There were two major nuclear drive projects back in the day: NERVA, or Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications; and Orion. NERVA definitely worked, and would be a pretty good medium-range drive, but it wouldn’t get you to the outer system and back fast.
“Orion absolutely would. Even in the 1960s they had serious designs for ships that could mass millions of tons. But . . .”
Jeanne had gotten her mind around the idea finally. “But? I would think so, but! You’d be launching that from the ground, detonating nuclear bombs in-air all the way up? What kind of environmental nightmare would that have been?”
“Real stopper was the test ban treaty,” Green said. “No longer allowed to detonate nukes above a certain level, which Orion absolutely would. And then came the environmental protests.” He flicked forward to show a diagram of a massive craft dominated by a huge, slightly curved metal base with a stack of tubelike elements crowded toward the top. “But if you can get other countries to agree to allow it, nuclear pulse propulsion is the only way you can get out there fast with anything big enough to matter.”
“Fast is relative,” Hailey said. “Even if everyone said, ‘Sure, go ahead, ride nukes to space,’ it’d take a year to build one no matter how much money you invested. And you’d need hundreds of nuclear bombs. Fallout—real and political—would be awful.” He paused a moment. “Plus the fuel; we’d never get enough plutonium or U-235 without building or unmothballing major separation sites.”
“Perhaps not quite so bad as that,” said Eva. The secretary of energy’s expression was bemused, as of someone having pulled up a rotten board in their house to find a stash of gold bars underneath.
“You have something for me, Eva?”
“ICAN-II,” she said slowly.
“You can too what?” asked Hailey, puzzled.
“No, I-C-A-N Two,” Eva said, spelling it out. “An updated concept for Orion, using antimatter-catalyzed nuclear fission. I reviewed some of the literature on it years ago.”
George frowned, a speculative look on his face. “It rings a vague bell. But that antimatter business makes it sound like far-out science fiction. We’re not Star Trek here, we can’t crank the stuff out like gasoline.”
“Found a summary,” Roger Stone said, turning his screen. “I think this came from your office, Eva?”
“Yes, that’s it. We were reviewing alternative nuclear technologies at the time. Thank you, Rog.”
“It’s my job.”
Eva looked at the summary. “Yes, it’s coming back now. Madam President, antimatter-catalyzed nuclear fission uses very small amounts of antimatter to trigger a cascading fission reaction. Among other interesting properties, according to a number of people working on it such as Dr. Suman Chakrabarti, it can make use of U-238 rather than U-235 for the fission reaction.”
“Is that significant?” Jeanne asked. “Apologies, but I admit I’m not really very well educated on nuclear technology.”
“Most people aren’t, ma’am,” Eva said. “No need to apologize. Yes, it is. Most uranium is isotope 238, and normally it won’t fission—not in a self-sustaining way, that is. We need to refine out the much rarer isotope U-235, or somehow convert it into plutonium. U-238 is less radioactive, and much more easily available.”
“No kidding,” Green said. “We use it in everything from some kinds of armor to bullets. Though a lot less than we used to.”
“But that’s only part of it,” Eva went on, looking more animated. “It can be made to work on almost any amount of fuel, meaning that you can tailor the yield to almost any number.”
Green looked at her narrowly. “You mean on the small side?”
Eva smiled. “If I read the papers right, you might be able to build nuclear bullets. They’d be ridiculously expensive, needing a tiny antimatter-suspension capsule in them, but it might be possible.”
“How much antimatter are we talking about?” Jeanne asked. “And is it possible we could make enough?”
“I’ll have to check the numbers. But my recollection is that we can’t make quite enough as is . . . but that if you could take the three or four installations capable of making noticeable amounts of antimatter and put a lot of funding into making them dedicated to only making antimatter, you could fairly easily pass the threshold.” She shook her head, a touch of a smile on her face. “That was a ridiculous idea at the time, of course. What could possibly get people to abandon all their physics experiments and multiple tests just to produce antiprotons?”
“Fenrir would seem to be a big enough motivator,” Jeanne said, agreeing with Eva’s implied thought.
“There’d have to be a lot of work done on making foolproof longer-term antimatter storage, but that is also something that’s probably doable fairly quickly with Fenrir as a driver,” Hailey said, warming to the idea. “What about the pollution issues?”
“The proposed method would be a lot less fallout-intensive than normal nuclear detonations, as I recall,” Eva said. “You might want some new materials research—they proposed lead as a capture-and-ablate material and no one wants lead vapor in the air either, but on the other hand the ablation involves such a thin layer of the surface that it might not matter.”
“And do I understand correctly that if, God forbid, we have to fight, this same approach would allow us tailored-yield nuclear warheads?”
“I think so? Remember, Madam President, I’m running off of years-old memory and this summary Roger pulled up.”
“All right.” She took a breath. “Eva, George, Hailey, I want you to spearhead a quiet assessment of this—but I want it deep and detailed. Use whatever resources you need to get me that assessment. As I see it, we need to answer those questions definitively. Can we make and contain enough antimatter? What will it take for us to do that? How hard will it be to build the ship in question, and how long, if we have to? Assume unlimited budget and a buy-in from the other countries; if we don’t have that, we can’t possibly fly a nuclear-explosive ship.”
She stood. “Rog, this afternoon I’m going to hint that we might have a solution worth at least looking at. You work with them to give me a guess as to when I can make a real presentation?”
“Madam President, none of this is top-secret information,” Eva said, looking puzzled.
“No,” Jeanne said, and let her most cynical smile out. “But act as though it is.”
Because, she thought, I still have to play politics, with FORT and at home, and that means I only get the credit if I’m the first one to present the idea.