Elliot shook her head. That's a Cold Warrior talking. If the President does his job right, and if I do my job right, there won't be any crises to manage. That's the whole point isn't it?"

"And so far, you guys seem to be doing all right," Goodley observed.

The National Security Advisor ignored the remark, looking at her notes.

The walls were in place, and weather-sealed with plastic sheeting. The air-conditioning system was already running, removing both humidity and dust from the air. Fromm was at work with the machine-tool tables. Table was too pedestrian a term. They were designed to hold several tons each, and had screw jacks on each sturdy leg. The German was leveling each machine with the aid of spirit-levels built into the frames.

"Perfect," he said, after three hours of work. It had to be perfect. Now it was. Under each table was a full meter of reinforced concrete footings. Once leveled, the legs were bolted into place so that each was a solid part of the earth.

"The tools must be so rigid?" Ghosn asked. Fromm shook his head.

"Quite the reverse. The tools float on a cushion of air."

"But you said they weigh over a ton each!" Qati objected.

"Floating them on an air cushion is trivial, you've seen photographs of hovercraft weighing a hundred tons. Floating them is necessary to dampen out vibrations from the earth."

"What tolerances are we seeking?" Ghosn asked.

"Roughly what one needs for an astronomical telescope," the German replied.

"But, the original bombs -"

Fromm cut Ghosn off. "The original American bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crude embarrassments. They wasted almost all of their reaction mass, especially the Hiroshima weapon - you would not manufacture so crude a weapon any more than you would design a bomb with a burning gunpowder fuse, eh?

"In any case, you cannot use such a wasteful design," Fromm went on. "After the first bombs, the American engineers had to face the problem that they had limited supplies of fissile material. That few kilos of plutonium over there is the most expensive material in the world. The plant needed to make it through nuclear bombardment costs billions, then comes the additional cost of separation, another plant, and another billion. Only America had the money to do the initial project. Everyone in the world knew about nuclear fission - it was no secret, what real secrets are there in physics, eh? - but only America had the money and resources to make the attempt. And the people." Fromm added. "What people they had! So, the first bombs - they made three, by the way - were designed to use all the available material, and because the main criterion was reliability, they were made to be crude, but effective. And they required the largest aircraft in the world to carry them.

"Also, then the war was won, and bomb-design became a professional study and not a frantic wartime project. The plutonium reactor they have at Hanford turned out only a few tens of kilos of plutonium per year at the time, and the Americans had to learn to use the material more efficiently. The Mark-12 bomb was one of the first really advanced designs, and the Israelis improved it somewhat. That bomb has five times the yield of the Hiroshima device for less than a fifth of the reaction mass - twenty-five-fold improvement in efficiency. And we can improve that by almost a factor of ten.