D: Heavy Water
Neal Stephenson
A book about Those Who Know
D: Heavy Water is the second (and last, as of 27-Oct-2026) novel in Neal Stephenson‘s Bomb Light series. There will be more. I think I remember that the series was first advertised as the “Bomb Light Trilogy,” but Stephenson has lately become more vague about that, so we don’t know how many more are to come.
In the first novel Polostan, (which I have reviewed here) we met Dawn Rae Bjornberg, AKA Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, an American communist who ends up a polo player and spy in Russia. At the very end of Polostan Aurora meets an English journalist, Owen Crisp-Upjohn. This conversation follows:
“The OGPU wants me to sleep with you,” she said.
She went on, “I need your help getting out of here. Sure, I’ll sleep with you if you want. I’d enjoy it, and I can’t get pregnant. But you have to know what this really is.”
“Well then! How may I be of assistance, young lady?”
“Fall in love with me.”
“Done. Will there be anything else? Is there some acceptable pretense under which I might see you again?”
“Someone will make it happen if you show interest.”
...
“I’ve been called away, though. I’ll be leaving the country very soon.”
“Write me letters.”
“Which . . . will be read by OGPU.”
“Of course. Go around the world and do what you do. Eventually they’ll send me out after you.”
“Then I’ll see you out in the world.”
Owen, at this point, is a useless young man. He has no higher ambition than to be a fop, to dress well and scurry around the world and sleep with pretty young women along the way. His only pretense to usefulness is a desultory pretense at journalism. He writes little dispatches that will amuse The Readership (always capitalized) of The Newspaper (likewise).
By the end of the novel, Owen is a very different man. He has become a man of action with skills in military intelligence. At the time Aurora called on him to rescue her, he was beginning to understand that something new was being born in the world -- that Uranium was going to give rise to a new thing that would change war and the world forever. . He divided people up into a small minority, whom he called “Those who know,” and the vast majority, who don’t.
Much of the action of the novel is concerned with stealing some heavy water from Norway and getting it to a safe location. Heavy water is D2O: like water, except the two hydrogen atoms in water are replaced with two deuterium atoms. Deuterium is the heavy isotope of hydrogen, its nucleus consisting of a proton and a neutron, rather than just a proton, as H’s is. It is historically accurate that in the days up to and just after the beginning of World War II, both sides were willing to kill for deuterium. A lot of action concerned controlling the supply. In the novel Owen and Aurora take part in much of that action. This is all historically accurate, except for the insertion of the fictional characters Owen and Aurora.
It is a strange thing that, despite all the effort taken to secure the deuterium supply, deuterium played very little role in the development of nuclear weapons. Even without deuterium, Trinity and Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have happened in much the same way. The fight over deuterium ended up being almost entirely pointless.
Deuterium does now play a role in nuclear technology, for instance CANDU nuclear reactors use heavy water as the moderator. iI fusion energy ever becomes practical (they do say we are FINALLY coming closer), deuterium will be the fuel (or one of them) that fusion reactors burn. In the meantime, the stuff has has become rather common. You can buy 99.9% pure D2O from Sigma-Aldrich -- it’s pricy stuff -- 100 grams cost $523.
I enjoyed this. It was a little slow in places when describing the complex movements of the captured heavy water. And the Spanish Civil War, though treated lightly here, was such a vast confusion that nothing can make it clear. Well, you know, reality be like that!