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by Not Really Tom Clancy, Part II




 As I explained by the last post, the book WEAPONS GRADE is actually by Don Bentley.

But let's get over that and say something about the plot. One thing that Clancy fans (and fans of the whole enterprise) like about these novels is that the author can often work in a surprising amount of quite technical exposition, ideally without losing the thread of a suspenseful spy story. 

Consider the discussion of the process of enriching uranium into weapons grade material. That is crucial to the book, and in fact gives it the title. On p. 279 you get a full paragraph in which Mary Pat Foley, Director of National Intelligence, is describing this process, in the White House Situation Room, to Scott Adler, Secretary of State. 

"The process of enriching uranium is a straight-forward, well-understood task. Feed material in the form of gaseous uranium hexaflouride is fed into a series of linked centrifuges, known as a cascade. The centrifuges spin at extremely high speeds, generating centrifugal forces that separate the heavier U-238 from the lighter U-235, enriching it to the 90 percent mark required for nuclear weapons. The time required to reach the quantity of material to construct a nuke was generally thought to be months."  

Mary Pat directed that speech to the Secretary of State in the Ryan administration. This becomes tolerable dramatically because the Secretary of State represents the normal sort of politician in stories like this: a benighted fellow who thinks that a diplomatic solution with Iran is still possible, any actual usable nukes in their hands must be far off.

So she has to tell him gently, that according to everyone's earlier calculations that would be true, but Iran has found a way around most of the time-expending processes on which those comforting calculations depended.

Long before getting us to that meeting, Bentley had introduced us to a software engineer named Daniel who was compromised and turned to the benefit of a sinister international gang by means similar to that used by the Corleones on Senator Geary in Godfather II.  The dead hooker/honeypot routine. 

So we come to understand that in order to destroy Iran's breakout weapon development site, the Ryan administration needs to use a fancy new bomb delivered by a fancy new airplane run by fancy new software. Hacking that software, though, we also come to understand, had been the reason the bad guys had needed to compromise Daniel. 

And this all comes to a head, in a way I won't try to explain, by way of events in the small northeastern Texas town of Briar Wood, somewhere between College Station and Austin. The key figure in Briar Wood is a passer-through named Jack Ryan Jr. (though going by a pseudonym, as a Jack Richardson). 

The complicated storyline is handled rather well. I hope Clancy's ghost is pleased. 

 

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