A Cold Nuke 2 days before 9/11
Barney Barnum Bohum was no terrorist. Yes, he was called "the worst terrorist in history", but that is just overblown media prose. He was, in fact, a very loyal american, and a pacifist. Yup, he wanted peace (and even prosperity) for everybody. He was also a genius, a dedicated scientist, a gifted technologist... and a hell of an unlucky guy. Barney spent his life horrified with nations exchanging blows, fighting for scraps of the resources that nature sprinkled haphazardly around. He swore to himself that such waste should stop... Yes, he would put an stop to it. "Fusion technology", he thought, was the solution. He would spread abundance everywhere, and nobody would need to to fight for energy again. His electronics shop was located in New York, so he made his research there. By all rights he should have lived and died unknown among the crowds in the giant city - Like many cranks (who knows how many !) did. But BBB was not a conventional crank. He was genial enough, dedicated enough, and, as it turned out, unlucky enough to find a theoretical method of "cold start" of hydrogen fusion that dispensed with high temperatures, extreme pressures or even heavy hydrogen isotopes. His catalytic field, so speak, got energy from the fusion reaction itself in order to drive light hydrogen nuclei together in a simulated stellar environment. The device worked like a lucky gambler. All it required was the amount of energy to provoke a tiny, even microscopic fusion going. The energy from that fusion got re-invested (so to speak) and the gains pyramided many times over... As it turned out, even chemical combinations were a paltry barrier when the Bohum Field exerted its power concentrating protons to be fused.
September 8th - In his toolshed/lab Barney looked, mesmerized, at a tiny sphere of briliance in the center of the big glass tank. Soon, all his dreams would become reality. Not only his altrustic dreams for humanity, but also his personal dreams of fame, prestige... and fortune. Yah, everything he ever wanted would be his. He had already booked a large (in his view) meeting room on Manhattan. He had managed to get a dozen reporters from some fairly decent newspapers, and even got two tech-oriented netshows to send their cameras there. All this depending on this tiny spot of briliance, he thought, looking at the minuscule (less than 1mm of diameter) sphere flickering flame-like. And that was what it was, he though. A tiny, spherical flame that fed on water! Of course, for demonstration purposes it was too little, he had decided a while back. He would have to create a much bigger fusion flame to impress the media. He couldn't have them suspecting an hoax. He conjured up the scene in his mind's eye, and decided a fusion sphere of about 10 cm diameter would be suitably impressive, and still would not boil off all the water of a moderately large tank... Wouldn't boil it off too fast, anyway. He performed the calculations and adjusted the field projector. The fusion flame within a giant water tank, in a darkened room, would look like a miniature sun.. What it would, in a sense, be.
September 9th - The fidgeting audience couldn't decide whether it was bored or puzzled... The media knew Bohum wouldn't have gone the trouble of calling them there without anything to show for it, but his introductory speech didn't say much beyond "a fantastic development in the field of energy sources".Hopefully, whatever he had to show would be spectacular enough to compensate for their tedium....
Now, in retrospective, it is relatively simple to deduce what went wrong in Bohum's project. A simple consequence of Bohum's habits of thought. Educated as an engineer, he got used to think in pessimistic terms... specially concerning the efficiency of technology. Instinctively, he would first suspect any proposed modifications of bringing about a net efficiency loss. Tragically, an efficiency gain can be as deadly - or more - than an efficiency loss. Bohum's increase of the affected space actually multiplied the efficiency of the protonic fusion, with just a slight time -delay. Bohum and his guest witnesses had barely the time to see the ball grow in size to include all the enormous water tank while getting alarmingly hotter and brighter...Before being themselves caught in the explosion that incinerated half Manhattan while broiling the rest in sheer heat and toxic radiation. No signature could be found implying any known nuke of any known origin... Now what happens?
Will people blame the usual suspects, even without evidence?
Will there be war?
This is a twist on an ealier thread, whre the explosion was caused by terrorists with a stolen nuke. Here it wasn't... Will people behave as if it were?
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