Jim Hawkins came off shift from the nuclear research station DESY at 4:00 a.m. and headed his VW towards the dark suburbs of Hamburg. A peculiar traffic accident was his last memory before waking to champagne in an elegant country villa tucked away in the hills of the Black Forest. As Jim regained consciousness, a suave and elegant Herr Doktor explained that Jim was being “borrowed” by a sophisticated terrorist organization. Only in exchange for his nuclear expertise would the Doctor’s organization return Jim, his wife Leora, and their daughters to freedom.
The quote comes from the dust jacket of the first US edition of Nicolas Freeling’s 1977 novel Gadget. Freeling is best known for his series of books that feature Dutch detective Piet van der Valk. Although I’d heard of the novelist, I wouldn’t have known about Gadget if Physics Today reader Peter Zimmerman hadn’t written to me.
Zimmerman had read my feature article “Novel appearances,” which discussed the rare examples of physicists as main characters in novels (Physics Today, October 2018, page 44). His email not only brought my attention to another example—Hawkins in Gadget—but also revealed his role in the novel:
Nicolas was a good friend, and I was his coauthor on the project and wrote or outlined all of the technical parts. In addition, the opening scenes are based extremely closely on my commute from my lab at DESY in Hamburg (1969–71) to my home in Lokstedt. [The Hawkins] character is based on a mélange of other physicists.
Although Gadget is long out of print, you can still buy it on Amazon. Because it’s a thriller, I’ll refrain from disclosing the plot. However, it’s not much of a spoiler to discuss the implications of what’s hinted at on the dust jacket: The dangers of terrorists obtaining one of the principal ingredients of a nuclear weapon, highly enriched uranium (HEU).
When Freeling wrote Gadget, South Africa was on the brink of becoming a nuclear weapons state. One of the largest uranium mines in the world, Rössing, is in Namibia, a former German colony that had been granted to South Africa by the Treaty of Versailles. South Africa had also acquired the technology to enrich uranium to weapons grade. Plans for an underground test of a device in the Kalahari Desert in August 1977 were uncovered by Soviet espionage and verified by US aerial reconnaissance. South Africa abandoned the test but developed weapons anyway.
South Africa used the same basic design, gun-type fission, that the US used for Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The terrorists in Gadget chose the same design. Whereas South Africa had the material and the technology to make HEU, Gadget’s terrorists simply stole enough to make a 1 kiloton weapon.1 All the other methods and ingredients, readers are led to believe, are not beyond the ability of a nuclear physicist and the capability of a well-stocked garage-sized lab.
That last point is what makes Gadget both chilling and enduringly relevant. Enriching uranium or procuring HEU is the hardest step in making a nuclear weapon. That’s why the US worked so diligently with the successor states of the Soviet Union to secure stockpiles of HEU and plutonium. It’s why the American Physical Society is so worried about SILEX, a laser-based technique for enriching uranium, and why Princeton University’s Frank von Hippel and others vigorously advocate replacing the use of HEU in reactors with low-enriched uranium.
In my 2018 feature I asked why a novelist chose to include a physicist as a main character. In the case of Gadget, it’s clear: To build a nuclear weapon. I also explored how the physicist characters were portrayed. Perhaps because Hawkins was based on physicists whom Zimmerman knew, the portrayal is convincing. Hawkins would become so lost in thought at dinner that he’d forget his table manners, dip his finger in a puddle of sauce, and lick it.