ASK DR. SCHUND (C)1991 Alan M. Schwartz Dr. Schund, what is the thermonuclear sostenuto pedal? Cheap pianos have a "loud" pedal and a "soft" pedal. Quality pianos have a third pedal placed squarely between these two - the subtle, the miraculous "sostenuto" pedal. It selectively quiets the G-clef lines while sustaining the bass harmony, allowing your right hand to cleanly execute hyperkinetic gymnastics through the melody while your left hand enjoys the California lifestyle. Imagine Dr. Schund's surprise upon learning that quality thermonuclear warheads work in much the same manner. The common perception of a ten megaton H-bomb detonating at 30,000 feet is that of the sudden creation of a glowing crater a few hundred feet deep and a couple of miles wide, with ancillary nuisances radiating out to the horizon. Terran governments have accumulated near 100,000 devices. One imagines they foresee a day when all real estate is a buyer's market. Consider Congress, whose members have exempted themselves by law (so it's all right) from Social Security's endless hunger gnawing at their paychecks. Might we suspect that if World War III intrudes, certain arrangements have been made to protect those who will run the show, as opposed to those who will only run? Thermonuclear gadgets are implosion devices, layered like onions. A spherical shell of initiators and explosive lenses creates a smoothly collapsing detonation wave to trigger a spherical shell of high explosive. The boosted and still collapsing and concentrating shock wave impacts a shell of natural uranium with a density more than 19 times that of water, the implosion tamper, and SQUEEZES. A gap maintained by low density plastic foam is next encountered, allowing the densely shrinking hypersonic hell to further accelerate before impacting the plutonium core. Compressed to as much as 200 times the density of water in a fraction of a microsecond, critical mass is exceeded, birthing a peewee atomic explosion, much of whose ten kilotons of energy is radiated as x-rays, closely followed by a hundred kilograms of expanding plasma hotter and denser than the core of the sun, and wanting OUT! The matter is less interesting than the energy. The x-rays are faster, traveling at lightspeed. They flow into the body of the bomb by bouncing off its laminated inner surface, sculpted with sub-micron precision with alternating curved layers of dense and light elements to form an evanescent x-ray mirror. The remainder of the bomb is pumped down to a hard vacuum and filled with more low density open-cell foam. At its center is a long cylinder, also layered like an onion. A central plutonium core is wrapped with ceramic lithium-6 deuteride and tritide, surrounded by another foam gap, surmounted by a thick and dense implosion tamper skin. The x-rays flood the length of the bomb and the foam fill flashes into hyper-pressured plasma which, we've been here before, axi-symmetrically embraces the central cylinder. Implosion tamper becomes a dense hypersonic material shock wave, accelerates across the gap, implodes the ceramic, implodes the plutonium, and triggers another fission blast. With hell coming in and hell pushing out and a deluge of neutrons hot to party, lithium drinks a neutron and fissions to deuterium and tritium, adding to the heavy hydrogen inventory undergoing fusion for the main event - thermonuclear armageddon. If the bomb casing is uranium, and it is, outgoing neutrons fission it too, adding insult to injury. We will call this the "loud" pedal. In the late 1950's the United States and Russia discovered how to make a "dial-a-bomb." By altering aspects of internal bomb geometry before launch, a single warhead could be assigned one of many yields. We entered the era of the surgical strike, wherein a small cluster of Congressional districts rather than a complete state could be obliterated. We will call this the "soft" pedal. What would be the point of vaporizing Washington, Moscow, or a covertly CIA-funded 7-11 (it is the one in Pacoima that never gets robbed) if world leaders ruined each other's wine cellars? What of their remaining years on post-holocaust Earth? The superlative microminiaturization of complex circuitry in the 1980's, and the advent of supercomputers that could almost literally follow all the atoms of a bomb as its detonation was modeled, made it possible to deliver a thermonuclear warhead within feet of its desired destination, and to lower the symmetry of its implosion processes, creating holes in its blast wave. The governments of civilized nations of planet Earth pledged to play the game fairly, resigning themselves to the necessity of flash vaporizing Barbara Bush or Raisa Gorbachev, but promising to spare mistresses and drug caches as long as they were registered in the shared international Doomsday data base. We will call this the "sostenuto" pedal. Along comes Saddam Hussein with his home-made Iraqi A-bombs, and not a sostenuto pedal in sight. Approved thermonuclear warheads threatening officially allocated populations were but a memory. Suddenly mistresses and drug caches were again vulnerable to a madman's depredations! Something had to be done, and neither Moscow nor Washington peeped a dissenting murmur as the harsh tones were muted.