"Now a really expert design team, with the proper facilities could advance that by another factor of perhaps four. Modern warheads are the most elegant, the most fascinating-"

"Two megatons?" Ghosn asked. Was it possible?

"We cannot do it here," Fromm said, the sorrow manifest in his voice. "The available information is insufficient. The physics are straightforward, but there are engineering concerns, and there are no published articles to aid us in the bomb-design process. Remember that warhead tests are being carried out even today to make the bombs smaller and yet more efficient. One must experiment in this field, as with any other, and we cannot experiment. Nor do we have the time or money to train technicians to execute the design. I could come up with a theoretical design for a megaton-plus device, but in truth it would have only a fifty-percent likelihood of success. Perhaps a little more, but it would not be a practical undertaking without a proper experimental-test program."

"What can you do?" Qati asked.

"I can make this into a weapon with a nominal yield of between four hundred and five hundred kilotons. It will be roughly a cubic meter in size and weigh roughly five hundred kilos." Fromm paused to read the looks on their faces. "It will not be an elegant device, and it will be overly bulky and heavy. It will also be quite powerful." It would be far more clever in design than anything American or Russian technicians had managed in the first fifteen years of the nuclear age, and that, Fromm thought, wasn't bad at all.

"Explosive containment?" Ghosn asked.

"Yes." This young Arab was very clever, Fromm thought. "The first bombs used massive steel cases. Ours will use explosives - bulky but light, and just as effective. We will squirt tritium into the core at the moment of ignition. As in the original Israeli design, that will generate large quantities of neutrons to boost the fission reaction; that reaction in turn will blast additional neutrons into another tritium supply, causing a fusion reaction. The energy budget is roughly fifty kilotons from the primary and four hundred from the secondary."

"How much tritium?" While not a difficult substance to obtain in small amounts - watchmakers and gunsight manufacturers used it, but only in microscopic quantities - Ghosn knew supplies over ten miligrams were virtually unobtainable, as he had just discovered himself. Tritium - not plutonium despite what Fromm had said - was the most expensive commercially available material on the planet. You could get tritium, but not plutonium.

"I have fifty grams." Fromm announced smugly. "Far more than we can actually use."

"Fifty grams!" Ghosn exclaimed. "Fifty."

"Our reactor complex was manufacturing special nuclear material for our own bomb project. When the socialist government fell, it was decided to give the plutonium to the Soviets - loyalty to the world socialist cause, you see. The Soviets didn't see things that way. Their reaction -" Fromm paused "- they called it well, I will leave that to your imagination. Their reaction was so strong that I decided to hide our tritium production. As you know it is very valuable commercially - my insurance policy, you might call it."