A CAUTIONARY NUCLEAR TALE: EX-SECRETARY OF THE AIR FORCE PENS TERRORISM THRILLER WITH SR AUTHOR

Over the years, Thomas Reed, 78, has been pretty good at pretty much everything. So it was with some degree of humbleness that at this stage of his life, he found something that stumped him.

"I couldn't write worth squat," he said, recalling the reaction of his agent and his wife to the first draft of a first novel he was writing.

Reed had written two nonfiction books, but this storytelling was different. "A friend in Hollywood told me there's a saying about writing there: Wimbledon is next week and I need a lesson. I knew I had to find someone to help."

The Healdsburg resident found that someone in Santa Rosa writer Sandy Baker, and the collaboration turned into the release last month of his self-published novel, "The Tehran Triangle".

The political thriller focuses on what Reed believes is the real possibility that terrorists could set off a "low-tech" nuclear device in the United States. In the novel, an Iranian agent is behind a plot that involves the worst scenario of a topic that has been front-page news.

"There's a lot of talk about whether Iran will get a nuke," he said. "That question has two dimensions: One is time -- and it takes time to construct a sophisticated nuclear weapon -- and the means to deploy it across the world."

But as Reed shows in his book, a small group of terrorists can gather the means to build and deliver a simple nuclear weapon.

"Anyone could build another Little Boy, the kind of bomb we dropped on Hiroshima. You can find the instructions on the Internet. All you would need is a 140 pounds of enriched uranium," Reed said.

Three years ago, he was speaking at a conference in New Mexico ago when he hatched what became the plot of the novel. On the drive to the airport, he realized that the Santa Fe railroad ran past Trinity, the first nuclear test site.

It struck him that an organized terrorist organization could ship the ungainly Hiroshima-type A-bomb by rail and use Mexican drug gangs and unsavory transnational corporations to smuggle in the uranium.

Reed tapped into his careers in politics, engineering and business to construct the rest of the story.

He received his mechanical engineering degree from Cornell University, has a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California and served as an Air Force officer.

After joining the Department of Defense, he rose to be secretary of the Air Force under presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, where he played a signicant role in the strategy that ended the Cold War.

A sought-after consultant and speaker, he has written two nonfiction books on the Cold War and nuclear proliferation.

While expanding his role as an author, he also become a major winemaker in Sonoma County as co-founder of Clos Du Bois Winery.

Writing fiction, however, was a new and daunting challenge and he needed counsel.

His wife, Kay, knew Baker as a fellow master gardener and originally sought her out because of her experience writing fiction as author of "Mrs. Feeby and the Grubby Garden Gang" and "Zack's Zany Zucchiniland." Going from writing children's gardening fiction to fashioning a plot about a nuclear bomb threat might seem like a big jump. But for Baker, it was natural.

"When I started to write fiction, what drove me was my experience with gardening," Baker said. "I'd take gardening facts just like I've taken facts about nuclear science."

Reed said Baker won him over with her ideas on how to turn his tech know-how into a cogent story.

"She had some very sensible advice," he said. "I felt I could trust her and, as it turned out, we worked very well together."

Reed said they would often meet at a breakfast spot in Windsor to hammer at the details.

Together, they turned Reed's wild idea into a fascinating yarn, which Reed calls "a cautionary tale."

In a life filled with seriously impressive accomplishments, the former Washington insider counts it among his most cherished.

"I knew the technical part, but Sandy brought the characters to life," he said. "I'm thrilled with how it turned out."