known as a cascade. Not only is a cascade hugely complex, but it also uses the electricity output of a large power station and any leak or malfunction will lead to the release of deadly radioactive gas.
KURT LYDON
The Dark Sun network wants to offer its customers reliable designs for uranium centrifuges. Several European and Chinese centrifuge designs are widely available, but these all date from the 1960s and 70s. Their performance and safety is well below that of the best modern equipment.
Kurt Lydon was part of a legitimate engineering team designing a new Anglo-French uranium centrifuge. By November 2006 the design was complete and a small cascade had been successfully tested, but the French government cancelled a planned uranium enrichment plant. The centrifuge project was canned and Kurt Lydon was out of a job.
Despite the high security surrounding any nuclear project, Lydon managed to steal the computerised blueprints for the new centrifuge shortly before he was laid off. The theft went undetected, but MI5 identified Lydon when he met with a suspected Dark Sun operative in a Brussels restaurant in February 2007.
Over the following weeks, MI5 bugged Lydon’s home and all of his telephone conversations. Lydon was trying to sell the centrifuge design to the Dark Sun network for eight million euros. But the new design required sophisticated metal composites, bearings and motors that are subject to strict export controls.
Dark Sun might have been able to smuggle enough of these components to build a test centrifuge, but it would be impossible to get hold of enough specialised material for the fifty thousand needed in a cascade.
Lydon was disappointed that his state-of-the-art design was of no value to the Dark Sun network. However, he received a more positive response when he offered to redesign the centrifuge so that it could be built from simpler components and materials.
THE PLAN
Lydon estimates that his redesign work will take eight to ten months. MI5 has considered arresting Lydon and his contacts. This might provide some intelligence, but only with junior members of the Dark Sun network.
MI5 wants to penetrate the highest levels of Dark Sun. The only way to do this is to allow Lydon to complete his redesign and then track his progress as he travels abroad to build and test it. However, if Lydon is successful, his easy-to-build centrifuge could enable dozens of countries to start making fuel for nuclear bombs.
MI5 has contacted some of Lydon’s former colleagues. The centrifuge design contains over three thousand parts and nobody understands all of them. The engineers selected a list of four hundred key parts. These are all made from common materials, meaning Lydon would have no reason to alter their design or to examine them too closely.
Once the engineers had their list, they began to think up minute changes to these parts that would affect their performance. In a centrifuge spinning at 25,000rpm a hundredth of a gram imbalance in weight can cause a catastrophic failure; the wrong type of plastic seal can create an explosive venting of gas; or a tiny imperfection in the centrifuge lining can cause a heat build-up that makes the entire unit explode.
A failed centrifuge is likely to spread radioactive debris, but experts believe that contamination will be confined to a small area. Engineers and technicians working for Dark Sun may come to serious harm, but MI5 feels this risk is acceptable, given that millions of lives would be endangered if a rogue state or terrorist group obtained a nuclear bomb.
The engineers studied the individual parts and honed their list down to 143 tiny design alterations that will be unnoticeable on a computer screen and impossible to pinpoint in the aftermath of an explosion.
It is believed that ironing out all of these tiny faults will actually take longer than designing a new centrifuge from scratch. Testing the flawed design will also take years, cost millions of dollars and undermine the credibility of the Dark Sun network.
THE PROBLEM
Kurt Lydon has already begun work on his revised design. Someone will have to access the computer-aided design workstation in the study at Kurt Lydon’s Milton Keynes home and enter all 143 design alterations by hand.
MI5 believed this would be a relatively simple matter of disabling Lydon’s burglar alarm and breaking in, but the Dark Sun network is keeping a close eye on Kurt Lydon and has his home under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
No adult operative will be able to get inside Lydon’s office and access the workstation without arousing suspicion. However, Lydon has a thirteen-year-old