-42 couldn't even begin to compare with The Great
Depression of 1986-2000. Every civilized nation on Earth had been hit
and hit hard. The resulting governmental collapses would have made the
disaster even more complete had not the then Secretary General of the
UN, Perrot of Monaco, grabbed the reins of government. Like the
Americans Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, he had forced through
unconstitutional bills and taken extra-constitutional powers. And, like
those Americans, he had not done it for personal gain, but to preserve
the society. He had not succeeded in preserving the old society, of
course, but he had built, almost single-handedly, a world government--a
new society on the foundations of the old.

All these thoughts ran through Mike the Angel's mind. He wondered if
Snookums had discovered something that would be as much a disaster to
the world economy as the Bending Converter had been.

Fitzhugh got out his miniature flame thrower and puffed his pipe alight.
"Snookums," he said, "has discovered a method of applying the pinch
effect to lithium hydride. It's a batch reaction rather than a flow
reaction such as the Bending Converter uses. But it's as simple to build
as a Bending Converter."

"Jesus," said Mike the Angel softly.

Lithium hydride. LiH. An atom of hydrogen to every atom of lithium. If a
hydrogen nucleus is driven into the lithium nucleus with sufficient
force, the results are simple:

Li^{7} + H^{1} --> 2He^{4} + energy

An atom of lithium-7 plus an atom of hydrogen-1 yields two atoms of
helium-4 and plenty of energy. One gram of lithium hydride would give
nearly fifty-eight kilowatt-hours of energy in one blast. A pound of the
stuff would be the equivalent of nearly seven _tons_ of TNT.

In addition, it was a nice, clean bomb. Nothing but helium, radiation,
and heat. In the early nineteen fifties, such a bomb had been
constructed by surrounding the LiH with a fission bomb--the so-called
"implosion" technique. But all that heavy metal around the central
reaction created all kinds of radioactive residues which had a tendency
to scatter death for hundreds of miles around.

Now, suppose a man had a pair of tweezers small enough to pick up a
single molecule of lithium hydride and pinch the two nuclei together. Of
course, the idea is ridiculous--that is, the tweezer part is. But if the
pinch could be done in some other way....

Snookums had done it.

"Homemade atomic bombs in your back