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is that this is a viable weapons design. Whether it’s from Qaddafi or someone else, someone, somewhere out there, has gotten hold of the secret of the hydrogen bomb.”
    Exploding a hydrogen bomb was a task so complex it was often compared to setting a wet log ablaze with a single match. It required putting three competing processes into perfect balance under conditions of temperature and pressure so extreme they rivaled those at the core of the sun.
    Essentially what was involved were two atomic “triggers” on either side of a mass of thermonuclear fuel enclosed in a liquid membrane of tritium.
    Their explosion allowed for the perfectly symmetrical compression of the fuel which the tritium helped to drive up to the incredible temperatures needed for ignition. The entire assembly was wrapped in a cylinder of uranium 238 which turned some of the neutrons fleeing the atomic explosion back into the device, delaying its disintegration for the microsecond required to allow the whole process to take place.
    “The device is meant to be contained in a cylinder roughly the size of an ordinary oil drum,” Agnew continued. “The length is about half again as long as a drum. We calculate it would weigh almost fifteen hundred pounds.
    There are connecting wires meant, I presume, to be hitched up to some kind of separate control panel, probably a device that could receive an incoming radio burst and release an electrical impulse into the highexplosive charge.”
    For several seconds there was not a sound in the conference room. The President cleared his throat.
    “Where in God’s name would someone like Qaddafi have gotten the information to build something like this? Could he have gotten it from those articles that were published in Wisconsin in 1979?”
    “No.” This time Agnew did not hesitate. “Those articles set out the theory behind the H bomb very completely. But they didn’t come to grips with the precise formula behind it, which is that absolutely perfect quantitive and qualitative interrelationship between its three competing elements. Without that, you’ve got no explosion.”
    “And this design has that?”
    “Yes, Mr. President, I’m sorry to have to tell you the configuration here is exact.”
    Jack Eastman leaned forward toward the squawk box. “Mr. Agnew, I want to be very precise. What we’re dealing with here is a design, a blueprint, not a device in being. Are there still imponderables in here we haven’t talked about that could prevent this from going off?”
    “Of course there are,” Agnew replied. “Everything depends, for example, on those atomic triggers exploding with perfect synchronization, and that in turn depends on detonating with absolute precision the high explosives that set them off. It’s a very, very complicated process.”
    The President Coughed. “Mr. Agnew,” he asked, “assuming for the moment this device really existed and really was in New York and really was exploded, what would its effect be?”
    For a long moment, the little squawk box in the center of the table was silent. Then, almost as though they came from some disembodied voice speaking from another world, Agnew’s words again filled the room.
    “It would mean, sir, that, for all practical purposes, New York City would be wiped off the face of the earth.”
* * *
    “Hey, lady, got room in there for me?”
    The woman couldn’t help smiling at the speaker. He was a young Marine waiting to board the Eastern Airlines nine-o’clock shuttle from New York to Washington. Lasciviously, he eyed her figure swathed in her ankle-length red fox fur coat as she swept past him. Laila Dajani was used to men’s passes. With her long auburn hair, her black prominent eyes, the slight sensual pout of her wellffeshed lips, she had been attracting them since she was eighteen. She gave a casual toss to her hair and continued on to the shuttle terminal from the plane that had just flown her into the city from the nation’s