Polygon, Chapter 1

In which we meet our protagonist on maybe not the worst day of her career

(The following is the first of what will be an occasional serial fiction series, with updates every 3-4 weeks, interspersed with my (hopefully soon to be regular) posts on AI)

SCIF Meeting Room 2A
Washington, DC
May 3, 2031
2:34 pm EST

As she sat in the air-conditioned coolness, under the steady fluorescent lights, waiting for the President to log on, Dr. Sarah Langdon remembered a Christmas dinner four months ago at her parents in Illinois. The whole Langdon clan was there, and somewhere around the third bottle of red wine, the talk turned to “what's the worst possible day on your job?” Mark, her older brother, a pediatric oncologist, had good contenders. Their younger sister, Margaret, a Chicago ER nurse, had some particular bad days to counter with. By unanimous consent their father, Grant, won that night: 25 years in the Chicago PD detective bureau meant a lot of “sorry, sir/ma'am, but your son has been murdered. And we need to ask you a few questions.”

“Mom can't tell you hers,” Sarah's nineteen-year-old daughter Amelia said. Everyone laughed. Sarah had blushed, not just because of the wine.

“Your Mom only gets one worst day on her job,” Grant said, winking at Sarah. “And so do all the rest of us.”

Looks like there can be more than one worst day in this job, Dad, Sarah thought.

Especially if this worst day made the absolute worst day more likely.

Which, on reflection it just might.

At the head of the table, at her left elbow, her boss Dr. Ross Halverson sipped from a glass of water. They were alone in the room.

“Remember,” he said, “I'll tell him what's happened. You just have to explain.”

“Thanks Ross,” she said, smiling wryly at him, “that's a lot easier.”

She tried not to think about that as the display at the front of the oval conference room flicked on to display the Standby notice, bringing her back to the present. The screen was adorned with red banners: TS / NOFORN. Top Secret. Not for sharing with foreign countries. They were waiting for the White House Situation Room to connect. The text boxes on the edges of the screen showed that the other invited Principals from the Department of Energy, the Navy, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were online. No one was connected yet - all served (and waited) upon the pleasure of the President.

“Don't talk about past budget issues,” Halverson continued, “everyone will figure the why for themselves. We're here to state the problem and present solutions.”

Since they’d become aware of the problem 72 hours ago, they’d been struggling to come up with better solutions than what they were going to offer to the National Security Council. These were, however much she found them distasteful, the best they had to offer.

“Right,” Sarah said. At the edge of her hearing, a high pitch hum started: the white noise machines of the Secure Compartmented Information Facility humming to life to disrupt any external listening devices. The screen at the front switched from the standby notice to the long oak table of the White House Situation Room. The video conference software labelled each participant with a white box below where they sat, their title in black text, but it really wasn't necessary. Sarah had been in these meetings, in this same secure conference room, quite a few times before. There were many familiar faces. Though before she had been there as a mute witness rather than one who had to give testimony.

Halverson had assured her the unpalatable news would go down best coming from the chief scientist of the agency. When he’d said that Sarah had wished, for the first time in twenty-five years, that she was back in academia, wondering how she would ever feed a family on a Physics lecturer’s salary. But there wasn’t any more time to dwell on the past.

“Good afternoon, Mr. President. I’m Dr. Ross Halverson, Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Agency. With me is the Agency's senior scientific advisor, Dr. Sarah Langdon.” Sarah nodded at the screen as Halverson spoke her name. Probably, she thought, this should have been presented in person - the White House was less than an hour’s drive across Washington. But she knew how intelligence people thought - a special meeting, in person, between the President and the head of the agency that looked after America’s nuclear weapons stockpile. That couldn't mean anything good. Instead, they'd been fitted in at what was probably the midpoint of the weekly NSC meeting. Probably after updates on the People's Republic of China and before the latest on Israel. Just a routine briefing by an agency head, if you only saw the (classified) schedule.

“Well, Dr. Halverson,” the President said, taking a sip from a White House coffee mug, “my daily briefing this morning only said you had an important update for us. Please begin.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Halverson began, “and thank you again for your time. As you know, NNSA submitted its annual stockpile stewardship assessment to Congress last month. You received the classified summary the week before.”

The President nodded. Halverson cleared his throat and continued. Sarah noticed she was clenching her teeth and held up her hand to her mouth as she worked her jaw around to relieve the tension, trying to make it look like a yawn. It was silly to try to cover it up. Even if everyone had been looking directly at her, they wouldn't remember anything about it after what Halverson was about to say. It still didn’t seem appropriate to stretch her jaw on camera. Didn’t go with the gravity of the situation.

“I regret to inform you that we need to make an urgent update to that report. New evidence has come to light in the weeks since I testified before the House Armed Services Committee that highlights a critical vulnerability in the stockpile. This agency can no longer certify the reliability of the W-88 warhead.”

Halverson let that hang in the air. The surveillance-deterring white noise now seemed deafening to Sarah. It was that quiet.

Halverson looked over to her and nodded. Sarah shuffled her notes and cleared her throat.

“Mr. President, our latest test series on the W-88 sea-based deterrent warhead observed a previously unknown interaction between the aging high explosive components of the warhead and manufacturing variances between the early series plutonium pits. The interaction wasn't captured in our modelling parameters and appears to have developed over time through a degradation mechanism we are only now beginning to understand.”

“So, you are saying…” the President began, looking suddenly older than his fifty-five years.

“We cannot be confident that the explosive components would achieve a criticality and the targeted four-hundred seventy-five kiloton yield. That is, we cannot be certain that the W-88s in storage and at sea would work as designed.”

“Jesus,” the National Security Advisor, sitting at the President’s right, interjected, “that what, half the at sea deterrent?”

“Sixty-seven percent,” the Secretary of the Navy said. Sarah noted he knew that number off the top of his head. “Under the budget difficulties the previous administration experienced, the sea-based deterrent, dependent on submarines as well as Trident missiles, was downgraded as part of the stockpile renewal program. Four SSBNs were retired, and most of the W-76 warheads were removed from service as they approached end of life rather than put through refurbishment.”

Sarah was glad the Secretary had brought that up. It was no one on the call's fault, but she had been there during the budget battle ten years before. Drones and autonomous systems won the day during the cuts - ring fencing Taiwan with lethal underwater unmanned vehicles had kept the People’s Republic of China at bay during the end of Xi Jinping’s tenure as Chairman and the chaotic transition to Secretary Liu. But the damage was done to the NNSA. She had attended a lot of retirement parties at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Pantex during the late 2020s. Parties that also retired whole job roles.

“And you're telling us before next year's report to Congress… “the President said.

“Because we are going to need to ask for emergency funding.”

“Okay,” the President said after letting out a breath and looking down at the pad of paper in front of him, possibly doing some mental arithmetic. “That's it? It shouldn't be hard to convince the House Armed Services Committee for a few billion to cover an emergency.”

“I regret to say, Mr. President,” Halverson continued, “that the situation is a great bit more dire than that. We're facing not just a testing failure but a knowledge transmission failure. Everyone who worked on the W-88 and its refurbishment in the 2010s has retired, passed away, or been away from the systems so long their knowledge is out of date. No one at NNSA, at any of our labs, knows how to bring a warhead from design through to final deployment any longer. NNSA has lost the capacity to produce new nuclear weapons. Further, our ability to refurbish weapons has also diminished. The W-88 is only the first warhead this is going to happen to. We had warned about this in 2028, but our recommendations weren’t followed through upon.”

Sarah noted how Halverson deftly stuck that last bit in - it was your predecessor’s fault. The good servant provides both a solution and the excuse.

“You're telling me it's going to take more than a few billion and some Defense Production Act orders, then.” The President said. She noted mention of the Act - it was a superpower the government wielded, able to make any contractor or supplier to the US government fulfill its orders over any other customer. NNSA had used it in the past to requisition almost the whole nation’s available supply of beryllium metal for the B-61 Mark 12 rebuild two decades ago. The President understood at least that much of the situation.

But you couldn't requisition talent and skills that had vanished like you bought metal and semiconductors from suppliers. You had to rebuild them yourself.

“Dr. Langdon has drawn up a list of recommendations.” Halverson said.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Sarah said. She read from her paper, not wanting to look at the faces on the screen to see how they were reacting. “I have three linked recommendations. One, launch a crash program to rebuild NNSAs ability to design, produce and certify complete nuclear warheads. Refurbishment of Oak Ridge and the Y-12 site in the 2010s is sufficient for producing replacement components for existing designs, from casings to high explosives to plutonium pits. What we are lacking is the end-to-end production knowledge, the tacit knowledge to build functioning weapons. That will require a scaleup of production facilities to accommodate design work and production experimentation, as well as extensive recruitment and training. We estimate we would need seventy to one hundred and ten billion dollars over ten years to resurrect that capacity.”

“Secondly, change the mix of deployed warheads to use more reliable warheads, like the remaining W-76 series. We are confident of their performance and can certify their reliability.”

“That's still a net reduction in deployed weapons,” she heard the National Security Advisor say.

“Yes,” Sarah agreed without looking up into the webcam, “which brings me to my third point. In order to certify the remaining W-88 warheads, and to make sure our training codes are up to date, we recommend preparing the Nevada National Security Site for a live test of a weapon pulled from deployment.”

Sarah had not thought it were possible, but the silence got even deeper, and the white noise louder.

“My God,” the President said. She looked up then out of respect. The man was had turned pale. “My administration already had a near death experience getting revisions to Social Security and Medicaid eligibility and payment amounts.” He took a sip from his coffee cup, pausing to collect himself. “Now you want me to not only ask for a hundred-billion-dollar commitment but to restart the nuclear arms race with an underground test. We test and the Russians will test, the Chinese will test, the bloody North Koreans will test. And then the Pakistanis and the Indians, and maybe even the Israelis.”

Sarah nodded at the President's points and was about to answer when he spoke again.

“How much money can you reallocate from your current funding?”

“We can kick start the program with the half billion of remaining funding we have on hand, Mr. President” Halverson answered. “We can delay the refurbishment of the land-based warheads - we completed systems checks last fiscal year on the W-87 and W-78s. They're good for another three to five years, and we triple checked: they do not have the degradation and material fractures we observed in the W-88. And there is an already bored test chamber at the Nevada site, a leftover from 1992 prepared for a W-88 test that never went ahead with the testing moratorium. It will need instrumentation and possibly some expansion, but that lets us get to readiness much faster than needing to excavate a whole new tunnel.”

“Alright,” the President said. He sighed, then continued. “Get to it. Start rebuilding capacity and… tell Nevada to start prep work on a test. We're not intending to test, understand. We're just preparing for every eventuality.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.” Halverson said. The screen went instantly blank.

“Cheer up,” Halverson said, collecting his papers and fixing Sarah with a sardonic grin. “You did well. It’s not the End of the World. Yet.”

To be continued.