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Page 377
terior corroded by salt water. The interface between the missile and the warhead was a shambles.
A soughing sound, something like a groan of anguish, came from the group.
From her seat at the rear of the Quonset hut, Marina Suslova watched the back of Arkady Karmann's almost totally bald head. He must have been exposed to an extraordinarily large dose of radiation aboard the Pravda. His hair had fallen out in an odd pattern. Why wasn't he dead now? He looked so ill that he must be running on sheer force of will. Die, damn you, Marina thought, and I can escape this hellish place.
Commander Hebert caught her attention as she pointed a laser light at the tape frame. "You can see that the original design flaw in the system that damaged the power source was probably made much worse by the fall. The interface is badly shattered." Now a light from the RPV shone directly into the opening in the metal skin of the missile. The interior of the device revealed a tangle of metal plates, cables, and printed boards. The steel containment of the nuclear power source for all the missile's ancillary devicesthe inertial navigator, the various clocks, the imploders surrounding the warhead, and the timers that had been substituted for the failsafe trigger lockslay in a salt-corroded mess.
"Now you are looking at the source of the plutonium contamination," Hebert said. "The plutonium in the water does not come from the warhead. There, the metal is pure, machined into two fitted hemispheres that must be exactly compacted by implosion before a chain reaction can begin. The contaminant in the water is plutonium oxide from the power source. When used as an energy source, plutonium in this formdust, actuallyis convenient to handle, but very dangerous. Twenty or more years ago, a Cosmos satellite fell in north central Yukon. The extent of contamination was never fully admitted to the public by the Trudeau government for diplomatic reasons, but it was substantial. Plutonium oxide is,

 
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