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"It's the same principle as not allowing guards who have to go in among the convicts to carry firearms. If somebody like Orgzild got hold of a nuclear bomb, even a little old First-Century H-bomb, he could use it for a model and construct a hundred like it, with all the plutonium we've been handing out for power reactors.
Kemp had his arm inside the hole and was peering past it as he finished the cut. "Done, sir," he said, and adjusted the flame to a spout of red fire. He thrust the torch into the hole and quickly withdrew it as pieces of thorium flew out. A stream of water hosed into the tube would have worked the same way. Rip took a block of plutonium from Dominico and handed it to Kemp.
Rip added it to the front of the plutonium wedge along with a piece of beryllium from the bomb, and Kemp welded it in place. They put the thorium block which contained the plutonium into the hole, the plutonium facing outward. Trudeau rammed it to the bottom with his pole. The neutron source, the neutron reflector, and one piece of fissionable material were in place.
Kemp sliced another round block of thorium out of a nearby crystal and fitted the second wedge of plutonium into it. At first Rip had worried about the two pieces of plutonium making a good enough contact, but Kemp's skillful hand and precision eye removed that worry. The torchman finished fitting the plutonium and carried the block to the tube opening.
Their single five KT bomb contained at least enough plutonium for two critical masses, if brought together inside a good neutron reflector. Each mass should give about a two kiloton explosion. And they did have a good neutron reflector—nuclite. There wasn’t anything better for the purpose. "What have we got for a neutron source?" he asked aloud.
He hadn't tried yet for any of the radioactives except radium. He'd taken a full ounce of that in five raids, but hadn't attempted to get his hands on uranium, thorium, plutonium, or any of the other elements normally associated with atomic energy. Nor had he tried to steal any of the fusion materials; the heavy isotopes of hydrogen or any of the lithium isotopes.
At his direction, the torchman sliced a thin slot up the face of the crystal. Rip fitted the wires into it and held them in place with a small wedge of thorium. Kemp cut a plug, fitted it into the hole, and welded the seams closed. The tube was sealed. When electric current fired the rocket head, the thorium carrying the plutonium wedge would be driven forward to meet the wedge in the back.
However, final preparations for the test, which included the assembly of the bomb's plutonium core, did not begin in earnest until Thursday, July 12. The abandoned George McDonald ranch house located two miles south of the test site served as the assembly point for the device's core.
"When Gorkrink found out that plutonium can be used for bombs, he began gathering all the information he could. And as soon as he got home, he turned it all over to Pappy Orgzild." "That still doesn't mean that the Kee-geeks were able to do anything with it," Air-Commodore Hargreaves argued. "I think it does," von Schlichten differed.
Today, Mallorysport was a city of seventy thousand; in all, the planet had a population of nearly a million, and it was still growing. There were steel mills and chemical plants and reaction plants and machine works. They produced all their own fissionables, and had recently begun to export a little refined plutonium; they had even started producing collapsium shielding.
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