The Malthus Project

Chapter 1 – Countdown

Shortly after sunrise over the Sangre de Christo mountains the research team arrived at the Top Secret test site in a remote canyon near the Los Alamos National Laboratory – LANL (pronounced lăn’-ĕl). The dozens of canyons cutting into the volcanic mesa upon which LANL rests were first used during the Manhattan Project – the development of the world’s first nuclear bomb. In the seventy-four years since then, the heavily guarded facility has been home to research and development of cutting-edge military weapons, including miniaturized nuclear devices, high-yield conventional explosives, megawatt lasers, electro-magnetic sources, and biological agents.

The canyon offered two essentials for testing the new weapon prototype – absolute privacy and containment of the powerful output beam. Both of those features were required for the today’s test. The team had been working on Project Thunderbolt for almost two years. This would be the eighth test of the device in the past nine months – the first seven were failures. The chief scientist for the program, Brian Callaghan, had spent the night at the site, going over final calculations, analyzing the past failures, and checking settings on the control systems. As the test crew came into the office trailer they each greeted him with a nod, poured a cup of coffee, and went right to work initializing the computer software that would control the mechanical and electrical subsystems of the device. Thirty minutes later they had all completed their pre-test tasks and took the checklists to Brian for his final O.K.

He called them over and sat on the front edge of his desk, cleared his throat, and looked up. "I think you all know how important today’s test is. It has to work to prove that all these months of work weren’t wasted on a dead-end theory. If this test isn’t a resounding success, Washington is going to cut off the funding and shut down the project.

After each of the past failures we have redesigned hardware, modified software, and adjusted procedures, hoping to correct whatever is causing the failures. None of these solved the problem. Instead of sending a narrow beam of concentrated energy at the downrange target, Zeus spread it over the mountainside at the end of the canyon. For this test we did a major readjustment of the explosive timing circuits. Our calculations show that this should work – but the calculations for the first seven tests also showed it should work. Are we ready to do this?

The group didn’t show much enthusiasm in response – mostly just nodding heads. They were thinking about losing their jobs if this test failed. They filed out of the trailer and headed for the blockhouse where they would be protected if the entire system blew up. One wall of the shelter had a long slab of two-inch-thick laminated safety glass so they could safely watch the device during the test. As the loudspeaker announced the beginning of the countdown, most of them crossed their fingers or said a silent prayer, hoping that it might ensure a good outcome.

When the test director got down to fifteen seconds in the count everyone snapped their mind back into focus. . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . .

Chapter 2 - Infestation

The IKONOS satellite circled silently 400 miles above the earth, passing over the North and South Poles once every 98 minutes. With the earth rotating beneath it once every 24 hours, its high-resolution cameras and multispectral sensor array moved across the surface of the earth at 4.2 miles per second, providing new images of any place on earth every three days. One of its unclassified missions is to provide monitoring of the environment for agriculture and forestry applications. It’s classified mission is to provide imagery for military applications.

Although its capabilities are not as good as the dozens of military surveillance satellites in orbit, IKONOS is unique in that it was designed, built, launched, and is operated by private companies – American companies – for the purpose of making a profit. It sells images to support oil exploration, city planning, highway construction, the lumber industry, and several civilian branches of the U. S. Government. One of these is the Department of Agriculture which, among it other tasks, monitors the condition of the country’s forests.

Biologist Adeen Reilly was at her computer workstation studying IKONOS photos of the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountain areas of northern New Mexico. The infrared images of the heavily forested slopes appeared meaningless to anyone without the trained eye of Dr. Reilly. To her, each fifty square mile satellite snapshot revealed the health of the forest trees below. When she put them together in a mosaic covering the entire area, the patches of dead and unhealthy trees appeared as patches of blue amid the deep red of healthy trees.

Dr. Reilly – Professor Reilly to her graduate students at New Mexico Highlands University – had been studying these mountain forests for the past five years, following the destruction that the pine bark beetle left behind. At first it was only small patches of a few acres each, but as the growing draught left the ponderosa and pinon pines starving for water, the bark beetles moved in on all but the healthiest trees, and the patches began to grow larger. One of Reilly’s students put together a movie of the month-by-month mosaics that made the expanding patches of dead and dying trees come alive. The last two years were alarming. Areas of infected trees hundreds of acres in size now dominated much of the Santa Fe National Forest. Even worse, they were growing at an increasing rate. Reilly’s analysis showed that, by the year 2020 less than 20 % of the trees would be left standing.

Under a grant by the Forest Service, the professor and her team of graduate students were studying the biology of the pest, looking for ways to disrupt its life cycle and end the destructive effects of the voracious larvae. The money from the grant funded a new laboratory at the university, equipped with the latest technology and analytical tools, to unlock the secrets of bark beetle anatomy and reproductive cycle. At this point, they had a thorough understanding of the subject but had not found a way to stop them.

As Adeen reviewed the latest images she felt pressured to find a solution. Her three-year grant would expire in two months and without solid progress to report the Department of Agriculture would discontinue their support. There must be a way, she thought. I just haven’t found it yet.

Chapter 3 – The Final Test

three . . . two . . . one . . . initiate! Brian and the team watched as the explosive charge of the Zeus electromagnetic pulse generator ignited, sending a huge spike of power at the instrumented target half a mile downrange. They quickly turned from the window and went to their computers to see what the sensors recorded. Because of the mass of data collected during the shot, it took a few seconds for the graphical results to appear on the screens. When they did there were several muttered obscenities and fists slammed on desks.

The lead engineer on the project, Eric Pearson, turned to Brian angrily. Shit Brian! Another failure! We covered the entire end of the canyon with the pulse, and spread out like that, it’s not going to damage anything. If we can’t get the beam narrowed down to a foot in diameter the energy won’t be concentrated and it will be useless as an EMP weapon.

Brian looked down at the floor, feeling that somehow he was the cause of the failures. It was his idea from the start – an electromagnetic beam weapon that destroys nothing except the integrated electronic circuits that were the brains of virtually every high tech weapons system out there. I got it to work in the laboratory, even though it was only a small experimental device, Eric. I must be missing something crucial to scaling it up to full size.

I’m sorry Brian. I wasn’t blaming you. It’s just so frustrating working 18 hours a day, six days a week, and end up with nothing but disappointment. Like the rest of the team, I had confidence when we started that we would create a new weapon that could disable everything from enemy radars to guidance systems of missiles in flight, even spy satellites if we could make it powerful enough. But I think we’ve hit a dead end here. I’m going to update my resume and start looking for something else.

I don’t blame you, Eric. I’m going to stay on with the crew to look for the problem and maybe get one more test in before they shut us down.

Well, I offer you my sincerest wishes for success, Brian, but I have a wife and kids to support so I can’t wait around for a pink slip.

I understand. I hope that you find a new position quickly. If you need me to write a letter of recommendation for you, let me know. It will be a good one; you’re a bright engineer and a hard worker. I’m going to send the crew home for the weekend, so there’s no reason for you to hang around. Go home and surprise your wife with a mid-afternoon hug.

Thanks, Brian.

Monday morning Brian gathered the team around the Zeus system. Eric didn’t show up, but Brian didn’t really expect him to. Zeus was impressive looking – an eight-foot-long, two-foot diameter cylinder with hundreds of cables and stainless steel pipes sticking out from various places. The inside was even more impressive – at least to the engineers and technicians who created it. Instead of integrated circuits, which would have been blown out by the giant EMP pulses, micro-mechanical machines performed the logic and control tasks. By opening and closing tiny valves to let the thin hydraulic fluid flow where it was needed, microscopic gear wheels, levers, and motors performed the functions usually assigned to wires, electrical current, and micro-electronics. It took a brilliant, innovative mind to design these components, and that’s where Brian came in.

Brian was always the brightest kid in class as a child and as a teenager. He ‘invented’ things that would never be practically useful, but that didn’t matter to him. It was the creative thinking process that he fed on. His junior and senior years of high school his science fair projects won first place, and he spent those two summers working for a major electronics manufacturer as a laboratory assistant. After earning his bachelor’s degree in laser systems engineering he immediately went on to get his master’s degree in electromagnetic field theory. He thought about continuing to get a PhD, but was anxious to get to work with what he had already learned.

His greatest interest was in the field of lasers and optics and, when he found out the latest state-of-the-art work was happening at the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico, he applied for a position. Six years later he was a leading expert in high power lasers and had several patents in that field, but it was already getting old for him. The challenge and excitement were gone. So he looked for something new and found an opening at LANL doing research on electromagnetic pulse – EMP – applications.

The possibility of creating a giant electromagnetic pulse was virtually unknown until July 9th, 1962, when the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission detonated a high-altitude nuclear warhead over the pacific ocean 900 miles southwest of the Hawaiian Islands. The EMP produced by the explosion caused electrical damage in New Zealand and Hawaii, where it blew out hundreds of streetlights and disabled the telephone company microwave system.

It also created other unexpected effects. The high energy electrons it generated produced an aurora, usually confined to the North and South Pole regions, over the central pacific ocean for several minutes. Other energetic electrons were trapped in the earth’s magnetic field lines and went on to destroy the solar panels of seven U. S. and Soviet satellites over the next few months.

The first response of both cold war countries was to immediately begin research programs to harden electronic components against EMP. Many years later the research turned towards using EMP as a weapon against an adversary’s military electronics. But there was a problem with that. Although it eventually became possible to generate an EMP with conventional explosives, there was no way to create a pulse that would confine its energy to a small target area from a distance. There was a program to develop low-altitude cruise missiles with EMP warheads that could be set off within a mile or two of selected targets, but the effective range wasn’t much greater than standard explosive warheads, which were a lot cheaper.

After four years of research developing EMP-proof micro-mechanical replacements for electronic components, Brian had an epiphany. What if he could apply his understanding of laser physics, in which light is concentrated into a narrow beam that can destroy targets hundreds of miles away, to generating giant electromagnetic pulse beams? He spent hundreds of hours of his own time developing the theory and exploring ways to implement it before he came up with the answer. An EMP created by an explosive electrical capacitor could be confined in a cylindrical chamber with special ‘mirrors’ at each end to reflect the pulse back and forth at the speed of light until the energy was a million times greater than the original pulse. After the pulse energy reached super high levels, one of the mirrors would be explosively disintegrated, allowing the single-pulse beam to escape from the end of the cylinder and travel as a narrow beam to targets up to 80 miles away. At least that’s what his calculations showed.

Brian presented his idea to the decision makers at LANL, asking for funding to develop a full scale prototype for testing. Brian was highly regarded there for his ability to develop and demonstrate experimental concepts, but without a PhD he wasn’t one of the lab’s ‘golden boys’ who got priority funding for any idea they came up with and they turned him down. But, since Brian developed the idea on his own time, he submitted a proposal to another funding source, the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, DARPA. They contacted him a week later and asked him how soon he could get started and how much money he needed. He told them he had found a deserted canyon within the Los Alamos compound that was perfect for developing, assembling, and testing his device, which DARPA had named ZEUS. After a phone call from the Secretary of Defense, the Director of LANL phoned and told Brian he would have all the support he required.

So on Monday morning, after the latest test failure, Brian was ready to admit that his idea was flawed – there must be some theoretical point that he missed in designing the system. As they stood around the cylindrical device with their eyes on Brian he began his apology. I’m sorry I dragged you all along with me on this pipe dream. I have failed not only DARPA and LANL, but each of you personally. I only hope that I haven’t sidetracked your careers into a dead end technology with no future. I expect a letter from DARPA within a couple of weeks canceling project Thunderbolt. I can keep most of you on for another month to help dismantle the system and crate it for storage. After that . . .

Jorge Gonzales, his best technician, cleared his throat and spoke up. So you think we have a couple of weeks before they shut us down? Well, I think we should try to get one more test in before then.

That sounds good, Jorge, but why should we expect any different result than last week’s test? Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?

After each past failure we made small changes and adjustments to the system hoping to find the cause. I think this time we should dismantle the entire system, down to the smallest component, check everything against the design specifications, then reassemble it for the final test.

At that point the test director, Frank Adkins, interrupted. That’s a stupid idea, Jorge. There’s no way we can do all that just two weeks. It’s a three or four week job at least. We would just be wasting out time. And even if we could get it done we’ll have nothing but another failure on our record.

Jorge answered angrily. Who you callin’ stupid, Frank. If we work days and nights and through the weekends we could do it. What do you think, Brian?

I like the idea, but you all have been overworked for the last three months. It’s time you rested.

One of the other crew members added his thoughts. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m in. What do you say?

All but Frank agreed. ‘What will you accomplish by taking it apart and putting it back together? Nothing will change. It still won’t work."

Brian had made up his mind. I understand your frustration, Frank. I can bring in another test director if you don’t want to be part of this.

Oh, I’ll stay. Someone has to make sure you guys don’t screw something up.

Thank you all for joining in for one last try. Maybe luck will be with us on this one. Let’s get to work.

Chapter 4 – It’s Called Teaching, Ma’am.

As Professor Reilly was preparing to teach her next class on Forest Management she searched online for examples illustrating how insects, parasites, blights, and fungi affect tree health. She found photographs showing each of them in close up shots, but she wanted to close the lesson with a broader view of the damage they can cause. She immediately thought of pine beetle infestation images from the IKONOS satellite. She would use a few of the snapshots from her pine bark beetle project.

Today we looked at several of the pests that can damage various pine tree species. Most of these affect smaller areas – an acre or two – but there are some that can cause wide-spread damage. Here in the southwest the worst of these is the mountain pine bark beetle, and the Santa Fe National forest to the west of us has been particularly hard hit. I have been studying the problem using infrared images from a satellite named IKONOS. These images are particularly good for forestry applications because the resolution is good enough to see individual trees. This slide is a single seven by seven mile area around the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Notice how many trees are dead or dying – almost 90 % of them There are only a few isolated healthy trees left.

One of her students raised his hand with a question. What about that cluster of healthy trees just north of the town. Why aren’t they dead like the surrounding area?

Adeen looked closely at the image on the large screen TV. "I don’t know. I haven’t noticed it before. Maybe there’s an underground spring or creek that keeps them irrigated. I’ll have to look into that. Thank you for pointing it out, Antonio.

"Tomorrow I’ll talk about the effects of too little or too much water on deciduous trees. Don’t forget the exam next week. If you prepare for it, you will do well. If not . . .

Reilly couldn’t wait to get back to her computer to zoom in on the area of healthy trees her student noticed. What is it about that spot that keeps the trees healthy – protects them from the beetles? She asked herself. It could be a water source, but it’s too large an area for a spring or creek to be the answer. Maybe there is something about their genetic makeup that wards off the beetles. Come on computer . . . wake up.

Twenty minutes later she had put together a movie of close-up images showing the small area over the past year. As she watched, the pine beetle damage closed in around the thirty-five acre area, but then it moved on past. For some reason the beetles didn’t like those trees. Let’s zoom in for a closer look at the terrain. Adeen spent more time talking to herself than to those around her. That’s how she reasoned her way through a problem.

What she saw surprised her. The trees were at the upper end of a narrow canyon. There shouldn’t be much water there since it would all run downhill toward the mouth of the canyon. And most of the trees are growing on the steep hillside above the canyon floor. What’s going on here? I would love to go there to collect some samples, but that Los Alamos stuff is all Top Secret. They probably wouldn’t let me in. . . . but it doesn’t hurt to try. Dr. Huggins in the physics department used to work there. Maybe he has some contacts.

Three days later she was at the entry point to LANL getting her temporary visitors badge. They would let her into the upper part of the canyon only, and no cameras or cell phones were allowed. She had to leave those behind at the entry point to be picked up when she left. That was a disappointment. Photographs were one of her main tools for collecting data. She wasn’t even permitted to take written notes. Apparently there was something hush-hush going on in that canyon.

She climbed into a military Jeep with her escort – actually a security guard since he was wearing a sidearm – and they headed off toward Pajarito canyon. Because they weren’t permitted into the lower end of the canyon, they drove to the mesa above the west end of the deep ravine.

We’ll have to descend into the area from here. It’s pretty steep and rocky. Can you handle it.

Adeen could have taken it as a ‘me Tarzan – you Jane’ put-down of the weaker sex, but she chose to ignore it. Hiking in the mountains was one of her favorite pastimes and she had the leg muscles to prove it. Coming back up the slope she would leave him gasping for breath.

It wasn’t long before they were in the middle of healthy ponderosa and pinon trees. She stopped to examine several of the trees and couldn’t believe what she saw. There were adult pine beetles everywhere she looked, flying from tree to tree and choosing a place to lay their eggs. But there were none of the sap-encrusted bore holes that the larvae make as they chew their way out of the tree. She took several small plastic bags from her pocket and collected a few dozen male and female beetles to study. She also went to into the bordering infested area, where trees were bleeding sap through the larva holes on their way to a slow death, and collected more beetles. After labeling each sample bag she turned to the ‘escort’ and said with a smile on her face, I’m done. Race you to the top.

Back in her lab at NMHU Adeen put each of the beetles she collected into a large compartmented tray. Each beetle was stuck to a square of adhesive on the bottom to hold them in place and alive until it was their turn to be dissected. She had phoned two of her graduate students, Judy and Gail, on her way back from Los Alamos and asked them to have everything ready to test the new batch of insects when she got there.

The experimental procedure was relatively simple and had been used on thousands of bark beetles and other insects in Dr. Reilly’s lab. The subject was frozen solid in liquid nitrogen, then inserted into a microtome – an instrument that cuts very thin cross-sectional slices of the insect – which were then placed on microscope slides. These were put under a high magnification video microscope, which sent digital images to a computer for study.

When Adeen came into the laboratory, Judy and Gail broke off their conversation about who they could set the professor up with for a date and handed her a lab coat.

Did I interrupt something? You two seemed deep in conversation.

Gail got a guilty look and stared at the floor. Judy was a little bolder. We were talking about who would be a good match for you – you know, on a date – or something more serious.

And what makes you think I would be interested in that?

The rumor is that you don’t have a man friend and hardly ever date. That’s a long time to go without . . . male companionship. So we thought maybe we could put you together with a guy we know."

If this guy is a classmate of yours he’s way too young for me. I’ve had enough of immature males. Wait a minute; isn’t that term redundant?

But you spend all your time working on bugs. You need some fun in your life.

Would you believe me if I told you that I actually enjoy my work?

Yeah, but not in the way you could enjoy a man.

I know where your minds are and I don’t want to go there. Let’s get to work.

Two days later they had sliced up two dozen beetles and had them mounted on microscope slides, photographed, and stored as images in the lab computer. The beetles were tiny, about the size of a grain of rice, and they sliced each one into 100 slices, so they had over two thousand samples to compare. Doing this with hand and eye would take them weeks, and they might miss some crucial differences. But Gail, the team’s computer whiz, had developed a program to scan every image and highlight differences between selected samples. The computer first paired up insects samples from healthy trees and diseased trees, labeled HT and DT, and then compared them a slice at a time. The differences were highlighted for closer inspection on the lab’s 55 inch ultra high definition TV screen.

Now that the computer’s work was finished, it was time for humans to take over. The three women sat down in front of the screen and brought up the images highlighted by the computer. The first thing they noticed was the large number of images with some kind of variation in anatomy. Every insect, like every person, has anatomical variations from the textbook norm, and the computer dutifully highlighted all of them.

After an hour Adeen was frustrated. They had to zoom in on each highlighted area and visually inspect it to find the differences. It was taking way too long and they hadn’t identified a specific anomaly that could keep the beetles from reproducing.

Girls, there has to be a better way to go about this – some way to pre-filter the images to cull out the insignificant differences. It could be something in the reproductive organs – of either the males or females. It could be the organs that produce the pheromone perfume that draws the males to the females. It could even be that the DNA instructions for how to mate were defective. Any ideas?

They all thought for a few minutes, then Judy asked, Is there a way we could extract some of the female pheromones? Then we could expose the males to it and see if they get . . . excited. If it worked for both the healthy and dead tree beetles we could rule out pheromones as the culprit.

That’s a good idea, Judy, but no one knows just where the pheromones are produced and excreted. It’s not like there’s a book titled ‘The Sex Life of Pine Beetles."

Maybe I could do that for my PhD dissertation, then turn it into a best seller.

Gail rolled her eyes. Dream on, girl.

We’re brainstorming here so no idea gets thrown out initially. Write that on the board, Judy.

When Judy finished she turned to the others. We could carry it a step further. If we can isolate the chemical formula for the pheromone and synthesize it, we can attract all the males in an area into a trap.

Or maybe we could make tiny inflatable dolls as sex toys for the guy beetles, Gail added with a smile.

Get your minds back where they need to be, girls. Give me more ideas.

Gail wiped the grin off her face. I don’t see how we could work with the DNA errors, professor. At least not within the time and money constraints of the project. So let’s focus on the reproductive tract, specifically the ovum of the females and the sperm of the males as the most likely causes. If we don’t find any thing there . . .

That’s the best idea yet. Lets have the computer sort out those specific images.

Gail had a puzzled look on her face. Professor, that’s such an obvious approach. Why didn’t you think of it. . . . Oh, I get it. You wanted us to discover it.

Adeen lied. You’re right. It’s called teaching, dear.

After ordering the computer to change its search strategy Gail had another thought. What if I modified the program to subtract the HT image from a paired DT image? Then all we would see on the screen are the minute differences between them.

Adeen asked, "How can you