There was a muffled thud, an almost imperceptible shudder in the ground, and a little puff of dust from the top of the borehole. A few rocks landed near the hole, making little tick-tick sounds. Matson stopped the tape reels and the three gathered around the strip chart recorder. Even before the paper was torn off and spread out on the table, they knew that French's camerawork would find a place in some future documentary about this day. Counters five and six right in the middle of our projected range.
Backup counters confirm.
French was taping all of Friedman and Matson's examination of the charts and their reactions. It looks like either deuterons are getting accelerated along propagating cracks, or else little pockets of plasma are appearing that enable fusion. Think of it as the subatomic version of crunching a wintergreen Life Saver in a dark room. And when others had trouble making it happen, that pointed right at something very dependent on the properties of the metal. Now the Soviets are seeing neutrons when they crush fragments of titanium with steel balls in a bath of heavy water.