‘No one, bar the occupants of a Russian graveyard five hundred square miles in area, whose existence your predecessor, Sir John Hill, refused to acknowledge; an estimated four hundred thousand deformed babies in America; an estimated ten thousand premature widows of uranium miners; not to mention about fifteen thousand further completely substantiated incidences of death and disease I could let you have, Sir Isaac, if you would like; but I don’t want to put any ripples on your mill pond.’

Quoit looked distinctly uncomfortable, and Fifeshire kept out of it by concentrating on relighting his cigar. Quoit put his glasses back on. He wasn’t going to rise to my bait.

‘We have built in massive safety systems,’ he said, ‘against all operating accidents, and we have made nuclear power stations enormously difficult to sabotage, but it is impossible to guard against all eventualities. Whatever safeguards we come up with, if someone is determined to get through them, then sooner or later they will find a way. One just has to hope that no one is crazy enough to want to do this.’

‘It’s rather optimistic to hope that in this day and age, surely?’ I said. Quoit glared at me.

‘Isaac,’ said Fifeshire, ‘whatever you might think about the bunch of terrorists we are dealing with, however much we might all abhor their views and their methods, whatever they might be – zealots, fanatics – the one thing they most certainly are not is crazy.’

Quoit nodded.

‘Correct me if I am wrong, Isaac,’ he continued, ‘but a disaster of the magnitude you have outlined, if I understand you correctly, could be brought about by perhaps one man with a few accomplices?’

‘He would need several accomplices, some in quite senior positions, and he would need to be in a very senior position himself; but if that team was set up, and in place, none of them would have to do very much. Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979 showed the problems that can develop from one jammed valve. An operator misinterpreted the signals and thought the core was cooling down too much, when in fact it was starting to overheat. It was nearly goodnight to most of Pennsylvania. A team who knew what they were doing could easily put any reactor into an irreversible meltdown situation. I would think about six people would be needed.’

‘We don’t know how many reactors are targets,’ said Fifeshire. ‘We know there are five countries and at least one in each, and quite possibly more. For each one, they need six men in key positions: that makes quite a lot of people to rely on.’

‘It does,’ said Quoit. ‘On the other hand, the average reactor has between four hundred and one thousand staff, so six out of that lot isn’t a large percentage.