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Arzamas-16
USSR
August
18, 1978
David squatted next to
the KGB man. He looked like a child next to a Christmas tree and all the
presents were for him. He pulled out the first static bag and unwrapped
the heavy black plastic. Inside the bag, gently pressed into a white
half-inch Styrofoam board, were rows of dynamic random access memory
(DRAM) chips. They looked like an army of angry ants. He could make out
the silk-screen printing identifying the chip number and Motorola's
logo. He reached out next to the plastic static wrap and touched it
gently with his fingertips. He set the bag on the bench.
"I've never seen
anything like these things," muttered Yevgeny.
David nodded agreement.
"Just some computer hobbyist in the United States." He laughed to
himself, "I wonder if the fools understand what they have created."
He turned, his eyes dancing. "Imagine, Yevgeny! A computer smaller than
this case and more powerful than anything anyone has."
"It's not
possible," protested Yevgeny. "I've seen our computers. They are as big
as this building. The disk drives alone are almost as large as your
workbenches."
David reached up, pulled
a small Japanese transistor radio from a shelf, and handed to the Major.
"This is how. They've abandoned tube technology almost completely, and
they are moving towards the chip! The chip is getting smaller and
smaller. Each generation has more capability in a smaller footprint. You
can't do that with tubes. Tubes get hot and take up space, and space
requires a bigger footprint."
"But we make the best
tubes in the world," protested Yevgeny.
David shrugged. "There
used to be buggy whip makers too."
He pulled out a larger
bag and opened it reverently. There--each in their open bubble wrap and
static bags, were 8080 microprocessors. Stickers indicated that there
were stringent import/export control laws to be obeyed. International
Business Machines and a second company called Intel were listed on the
chips. David shrugged. Intel must be some minor manufacturer.
"These are the brains.
According to my studies this chip can address up to one megabyte of
memory." He spread his hands wide and explained, "The memory board would
have to be this large."
"How much would that
cost?"
"Thousands of rubles, I
am sure. No one has done it."
He found the PROM burner
and a set of PROM chips next to them.
Yevgeny shook his head,
"RAM, PROM, DRAM, CPU--an alphabet soup you're brewing here."
"Programmable Read Only
Memory--we'll burn the software onto these chips."
Yevgeny pointed at the
PROM chips asking, "On this you'll build the program for the trigger
mechanism?"
"Nothing quite so crude.
It will all be logic gates and buffers. I'll use machine code to make it
work. Then, Major, you shall have your portable weapon."
"How heavy?" he asked
eagerly. Details were always important when talking to his masters.
David looked into the
air. "I'd guess around seventy kilograms. The plutonium bomb should
take about twenty-two kilos, and the lead shielding probably another
twenty kilos. Then we'll need some sort of steel housing and the
computer trigger. I think we'll need some batteries as well." He
stood and rustled through his notebook drawings. "I'm setting it up
to use a dry cell in the event the lithium batteries fail. A capacitor
should maintain all information in the non-volatile RAM." He nodded
confidently. "It'll be quite a bomb." He looked down at the Major
and leered evilly. "You could carry it in a suitcase Yevgeny! But that's
the entire idea isn't it? A man portable nuclear weapon."
A cold finger traveled
down Yevgeny's spine. The Jew was supposed to be brilliant. Perhaps,
he was going quite mad as well.
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