George Washington's Ghost

He was thinking of the papers – a steady stream, a drip, drip, drip of them – on ionising radiation-related subjects published in the last decade in the British Isles, and several, fascinating ones which had been published under the auspices of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Until a week or so ago, he had complacently imagined the majority of these fascinating papers must have been based on the classified research carried out by the great powers back in the 1950s and early 1960s, and perhaps deliberately de-classified in the wake of the Submarine Treaty which, in effect, abolished the building of submarines and the development of under-water technologies in its title; but more importantly, had supposedly halted all bar theoretical atomic research either for civil usages, other than for medical applications such as x-ray or imaging, and banned outright all military applications of nuclear science.

He had wondered about the datasets many of those papers had been based on, and assumed that the Europeans must have had access to animal testing experiments prior to the signing of the Treaty in 1966. However, now two things struck him, both like unexpected blows to the guts.

One, either or both of the British or German atomic programs must have been far more advanced by 1966 than either of the parties had admitted; and two, that the English at least, must have continued to develop their program in secret in the intervening twelve years.

“When Don Rodrigo spoke to me,” he said, picking up the threads of his racing, jostling fears, astonished that the first relatively short telephone conversation with his esteemed university colleague had only been seven days ago, “I explained the things that I would need to look for to confirm, or rule out, the provisional conclusions he had already drawn from visiting the Ojo del Diablo district, and the areas to which the local Indian population had taken him, where reported pathologies and fragmentary morphological evidence suggested possible contamination by non-naturally occurring ionising radiation. The literature I have read on the research available on the radioactive pathology of mammalians is, surprisingly, remarkably informative, if somewhat speculative. Nonetheless, the mechanisms in play are schoolboy stuff, basic high school physics, really…”

Don Rodrigo caught his colleague’s eye and glanced at the nearest wall clock as if to say: “President de Soto and General Santa Anna are busy men and their time is very precious!”

“I apologise,” the physicist stuttered, “as my beautiful wife keeps telling me, I am not a very practical man. I tend to digress at the drop of a hat…”

Hernando de Soto smiled patiently, paternally.

“What you have told us thus far is most thought-provoking professor. Pray continue.”

“Yes, thank you, Your Honour. It was suggested that I stick to layman’s language. That is hard, the subject is complex and there are many variables.”

“We understand, Professor,” Santa Anna confirmed, a little distantly as if his thoughts were suddenly hundreds of miles away with his troops in West Texas.

“Anyway, once I’d spoken to Don Rodrigo, I knew what to look for. If, that was, the Sonora site was indeed a testing range for atomic bombs…”

He had said that word again.

Employed the plural form of it…

And he was about to say it

again, and he suspected, again and again in the next few minutes, days, weeks and years.

He took a deep breath.

“There are likely to be three relatively long-lived isotopic substances, isotopes, if you like from the detonation of an atomic bomb employing U235. There are other ‘fallout’ isotopes injurious to human health, and to the general ecology of local and distant sites from an atomic explosion, or more accurately, a significant fission event. In any event, there is nothing our present state of medical knowledge can do to mitigate, or to alleviate the effects of irradiation caused by the numerous exotic short-lived isotopic fission by-products, the majority of which would already be present only in unimaginably minute quanta by now, and therefore undetectable to the equipment available to us. So, I will disregard those. As I say, there are three particular isotopic markers, or contaminants, which are identifiable and tend to linger in the tissue of living mammals, and or, to collect in the fibre of the local flora and fauna.”

A part of Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena wanted to believe that he was not having to explain this, any of it to the two most powerful men in México, especially not in the middle of a war with an enemy who might, at a whim, start wiping the cities of his homeland off the face of the Earth, much in the fashion of an angry god.