Tension and suspicion spread after a clear case of radioactive sabotage occurs at the world's most advanced nuclear reactor, the Department of Energy's Kankakee station near Chicago. This station can do everything: it can burn up weapons material (mainly plutonium) from disarmed American and Russian bombs, and it can produce new weapons material (plutonium and tritium) to produce new bombs. The FBI and Nuclear Regulatory Commission investigators' lead suspect is Henry McClure, a Vietnam veteran who has a sixties radical antiwar past, and who knows the leader of the Chicago Energy Coalition which is picketing the nuclear station. Henry McClure fights desperately to find who really planted beta radiation emitting tritiated organics in the recirculation valve room. Suspects include (but are not limited to): Trung, a brilliant Vietnamese health physicist; Laura, an ambitious senior reactor operator and a rival of Henry's; Jim, a former comrade of Henry's during the sixties; Pete, an enterprising Canadian whose company produced the tritium detector which detected the radioactive sabotage; and even Henry's wife, Sheri, who has announced she is divorcing him.