George Washington's Ghost

The German Minister’s wife was angry and she was not the sort of woman a wise man ignored when she was in this kind of mood. Her blue eyes flashed with exasperation as she looked back to her husband and the Emden’s former captain.

“Commander Cowdrey-Singh is right. There is nothing we could do if the Dominicans violated the sanctity of the Concession, you only have to see how those toughs ‘working’ on the Emden have behaved to know that they know it as well as anybody. If they attempted to arrest our British guests all we could do is endanger the lives of the German civilians in the Concession. In effect, we too, are prisoners here. Either we accept our fate,” she looked around defiantly, “or we rattle our chains.”

“What have you in mind, meine Liebe,” her husband inquired almost inaudibly.

“God sent us the Emden. I suggest we take advantage of His divine intervention!”

Chapter 26

Thursday 4th May

El Palacio de Los Pinos de Oro, México City

Professor Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena of the University of Cuernavaca’s infant Department of Nuclear Physics, spoke with a quietly spontaneous, and after a few minutes, unselfconscious intensity which soon began to chill the souls of the other three men in the President of the Republic’s office.

“You must understand that if we, or anybody else, were to set out from scratch, as it were, to produce sufficient fissile material for just a single, very rudimentary atomic device it would probably involve the expenditure of great treasure, the diversion of perhaps ten, or possibly fifteen or twenty percent, of our national scientific, technical and industrial capacity, assuming absolute priority was given to the project over its whole lifetime, and even once we had sufficient fissile material, it might still take us several years to resolve the technical design, and the implosive technologies required to initiate a chain reaction, and then, even assuming we had access to sufficient ongoing quantities of Uranium, which we do not have because most of the World’s known deposits are in Australia and those parts of Southern Africa controlled by the British and German Empires, we would still not be capable of refining, or more correctly, enriching Uranium, chemical symbol ‘U’, from its most naturally occurring isotopic form of U238 to its fissile state, given a critical mass of around fifteen or sixteen pounds – incidentally, we have established that by theoretical means but what actually constitutes a critical mass for a given materials configuration would still need to be established by experimentation – to U235…”

The academic paused for breath.

President de Soto, and Chief of Staff of the Army, General Santa Anna, were viewing the dishevelled physicist with increasingly glazed expressions.

Arturo thought he had gone through the basic, what he regarded as schoolyard science with Rodrigo several times but clearly, the President and General Santa Anna were still completely baffled.

He hesitated.

I have been babbling like a fool…

He took a deep breath and started all over again.

“Uranium is a silvery grey metal with the symbol ‘U’ and an atomic number of 92, because it possesses the highest atomic weight of the ninety-two naturally occurring primordial elements. It is an actinide; all actinides release radioactivity over time as they decay and therefore, have a half-life, which, for isotopes of uranium vary between hundreds of thousands and billions of years. The isotopic form of over ninety-nine percent of all the Uranium naturally occurring in the environment is U238, so described because it has one-hundred-and-forty-six neutrons, and ninety-two protons, and theoretically – although in fact very unlikely to because it is unknown for it to occur in the concentrations necessary for it to happen – it is capable of spontaneous fission in nature, that is, a chain reaction splitting the nucleus of the atom and releasing exponentially large quanta of energy. However, as I say, since U238 is almost invariably found only as a trace element, that remains, to the best of my knowledge, a purely theoretical proposition. This is because at a sub-atomic level the ratio between neutrons and other particles reduces in relation to the number present in an atom. Therefore, to made U238 into fissile, or weapon-grade U235, it must be enriched so that the neutron count falls to one-hundred-and-forty-three, at which level the probability of the energetic random incidence of collisions with the constant ninety-two protons in the nucleus becomes, mathematically at least, unavoidable, and thence, given the presence of a critical mass of enriched Uranium – about fifteen or sixteen pounds, by my calculations – results in an immensely violent explosion.”