HOWTO build your own A-bomb
Today in the Guardian, the story of two plucky youngsters in 1966 who built their own homebrew A-bomb:
How two students built an A-bomb (via Make)
...the two amateurs were ironically aided by information published as part of President Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program, which spread word of the benefits of non-military nuclear power around the world. And Atoms for Peace was only the most prominent example of a fad for everything nuclear that propelled a huge amount of technical detail into the public domain.Eventually, towards the end of 1966, two and a half years after they began, they were finished. "We produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved," says Selden. "The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe's Machine Shop downtown."
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... and a link to the actual article, which even the Make site seems to lack.
Also, they didn't actually build the thing, just produced the plans such that someone with a machine shop and a supply of enriched uranium could.
The point was to illustrate that it could be done without access to top-secret information from countries that already had nukes.
Since the experiment, Israel, South Africa, Pakistan and India have proven this (although Israel denies it).
Thanks, Kieran!
Whith the white-and-blue color scheme, it looks not so much like an A-bomb as an iBomb.
The only good platypus is a duck-billed platypus.
So let's bomb all the others into oblivion,
If we actually manage to find some.
- Ratio ad Absurdum anion
National security takedown letter in 3...2...1...
Finally I have something to do with that enriched uranium I've been saving in my freezer!
Let this be a lesson, when ordering "yellow cake," make sure you are specific on the particular flavor.
One millon cold wars !
Attention Mr. George W. Bush: This is a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Now for the final step in proliferation: eBay.
I expect Boing Boing and Make will disappear forever later today.
# The Guardian,
# Tuesday June 24 2003
Today?
Well, anyway. I've heard about this sort of thing, literally, for decades: back in the mid-70s Reader's Digest ran a story from someone who'd done a similar thought experiment (i.e. not actually built one, but described the process with diagrams) as his senior thesis at Harvard. More recently, there was a NYC artist who produced full-sized mockups.
There was an old newsreel cartoon that got canned because the details of the entirely fictitious weapon it made up were by coincidence really close to the actual Bomb.
And the topic of the cartoon was that idle talk let secrets loose!
I remember in 8th grade my physics teacher told us how to build one with concrete, uranium, some pipes and a barrel. It was one of the most fasincating classes I've ever been in.
It was also the day that we figured out that you could get the physics teach off on wild tangents and never actually do anything in class.
To #12:
Re: the kid in the mid seventies. His name was John Aristotle Philips (Wikipedia)
The pic reminds me of Charlie Brown's shirt. Poor ol' Atom Bomb!
I don't see how this is a surprise. You bring enough fissile material together, it explodes in a runaway chain reaction. I learnt this in an encyclopedia for children, along time ago, before there was an Internet. As they themselves admitted, the hardest part of the whole job is to obtain the plutonium, which for their purposes, they assumed is already available. This is "no news". The bomb in the picture sure is cute though. Looks like something you'd find in a Japanese cartoon.
you,ah,trolling a little there Dainel?
nothing cute about Fat Man
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Victim_of_Atomic_Bomb_of_Nagasaki_01.jpg
It was also the day that we figured out that you could get the physics teach off on wild tangents and never actually do anything in class.
And the day your teacher figured out how to get you to pay attention so he could teach you something.
Scary. Sad. Depressing. I wish Einstein had been a locksmith and Make and BoingBoing had let this story go untold. I don't think engineering atom bombs, or drawing up the plans, just to see if we can is cool or clever or particularly useful. I hope the knowledge of the ease with which these weapons can be manufactured does not offer any additional pretext to invade and destroy nations. Please don't let McCain win. Please don't let McCain win. Please don't let McCain win.
win or no, an attack on Iran is probable and the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945 will be upon us.
According to the article, their designed used plutonium, not uranium, btw.
Testing out the design without being noticed would be hard...
"Scary. Sad. Depressing. I wish Einstein had been a locksmith and Make and BoingBoing had let this story go untold. I don't think engineering atom bombs, or drawing up the plans, just to see if we can is cool or clever or particularly useful."
The Nazis in 1940's Germany thought differently.
The Communist Soviets thought differently.
The Communist North Koreans thought differently.
A variety of theocratic, fascist, well-funded states think differently.
The thing is - If Einstein hadn't derived E=mc^2, someone else would have. If these kids didn't design an atom bomb, someone else would have. Hell, as a High School Physics student (admittedly, the class tutor) - I and my best friend designed and drew up plans for gun-type, implosion-type, and fission-fusion-fission type bombs, as exercises in compression wavefront propagation.
We figured out that one does not need an expensive computer with eons of runtime to design an efficient and appropriate uranium shell - one need merely machine bells from the metal (U-238 even!) and then tune them for a pure tone and strong sound - by hand.
The point of making this kind of information available is to let people know this: sixteen-year-old-kids are able to design and build these things using the information they pick up from library books and general theoretical knowledge. The genie is out of the bottle, and can never be put back in - focusing on Security Through Obscurity is futile and foolish. The real security point needs to absolutely be: Who has access to - or can refine - Uranium-235, Plutonium, and other isotopes needed to build small, efficient nuclear weapons - and how do we distinguish these people from people who are merely building a pebble-bed breeder reactor to power their own country?
I wish Einstein had been a locksmith
Wouldn't have worked. The remarkable thing about the Special Theory of Relativity is that it contains no math more complex than algebra. The tools necessary to develop it have been around since about the mid-15th century.
The other remarkable thing about it is that it took so long to develop since the math necessary has been around for centuries. Einstein was important because he had the necessary insight needed to develop it, but even he wasn't a prerequisite. Lorentz and Poincaré were already doodling around the edges of mass equivalence.
If I were observing some Einstein-less alternate universe I'd be stunned if they didn't have the knowledge to build nuclear weapons by about 1955. Someone would have noticed the excess of energy when splitting atoms for other experimental purposes -- kind of a pre-figuring of cold fusion's story, now that I think about it, only true -- and things would have developed very quickly from there.
Why is this tagged as funny?
Seems a bit morbid.
funny because the ever-so-sekrit ain't. I suppose you were born after the atom spies?
@ #5 Lionel. The kid in that story, David Hahn, got busted last year trying to steal smoke detectors for their radioactive content. Check out his mug shot. They suspect his open sores are due to excessive exposure to radiation:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292111,00.html
I wish someone would bust the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for allowing more soluble U-238 than insoluble in 10 C.F.R. 20.
If Einstein hadn't derived E=mc^2, someone else would have.
And just to prove your point, Einstein wasn't the first to derive it. Henri Poincaré did, or at least he did in the mathematically equivalent m=E/c^2.
What Einstein did was realize that the equation held all the time, not just in the particular case Poincaré thought it did. M. Poincaré actually thought he had a paradox on his hands he read his equation as saying that if radiation went out directionally, since the mass wasn't changing ("only energy is leaving", thought he) there would be recoil in the opposite direction. Since this implies perpetual motion, you can see why he thought it was a paradox.
Einstein's insight was that mass and energy were equivalent. In the particular case of the directional radiator, the leaving energy would cancel out the recoil, hence no perpetual motion.
So to reiterate what I said before, it's inconceivable that someone wouldn't have figured this out even without Einstein. They were within the metaphorical ball hair of having it without him anyway.
#20 Mdhatter: You are completely right, he might have been the best teacher I've ever had. We didn't learn much about physics though, we'd mostly steer him onto the topic of his travels around the world.
I was at a campground in New Zealand where I took this photo of a bomb they somehow acquired. The Kiwis are all very proud of their anti-nuclear position in the world.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidkha/383235001/
in junior high I had decided that someone would drop the bomb and we would all die. probably some teenage hormonal issues there, but mankind has a habit of using the weapons it produces. then, gradually, I thought: well, maybe we know it's too horrible and awful and people aren't so rotten. I read articles like this and that seventh grade feeling comes back -- someone, sometime is going to do it -- just because they can.
It's even easier today with the Nuclear Weapon Archive. Since the '60s when this experiment was done, there has been a lot more leakage of nuclear secrets. The cat is almost entirely out of the bag.
Wolfiesma, your comment: "Scary. Sad. Depressing. I wish Einstein had been a locksmith and Make and BoingBoing had let this story go untold." is shortsighted. As the original article stated, the genie is out of the bottle, and will never, ever go back in. The science that gave us nuclear weapons has given us many, many other wonderful things (MRI immediately springs to mind, amongst thousands of examples).
Also, nuclear weapons are one of the most significant political developments of the last 65 years. We walk down a path now that cannot ignore them. I think it is better to understand them than to wish they never were in ignorance. To evaluate our world, you have to know what they are and are not capable of. How easy is it to build one? How hard is it to make and work the materials?
Again, the genie is out of the bottle, and you should understand what these are. The Cold War is over, but it might only be on hiatus. Certainly, we should have a complete disarmament treaty for all nations, but to take that stance, you should understand where we are now.
Wow, that is impressive.
Any idiot can design a uranium bomb - it's dead simple, reliable, and the material you need is readily available. Plutonium bombs are much harder. If you don't get it exactly right, it fizzles instead of exploding, and the material you need is extremely difficult to manufacture.
I have no idea why the US is so fond of plutonium. It's a stupid design. I imagine it has something to do with politics.
...Otay, really impress me now, kids: Make a functional "Fat Man" or "Little Boy" in LEGOs.
The US is in the pocket of Big Plutonium.
#18, 19
I don't see how acknowledging the obvious could be trolling--knowing how to make an atomic weapon and actually having one that works and doesn't just fizzle are two utterly different things.
The knowledge is around and has been for some time--the devil is in the details. The machining and manufacture of the structure must be perfectly accurate. The amounts and ratios of the explosive, the type of explosive and the amount and shape of the fissile material all must be correct and perfectly accurate. It's a non-trivial task.
suppose you bash one together and if "fizzles". Only the force of a couple of thousand tonnes of TNT rather than the intended couple of ten thousand tonnes? Is that a "failure"? Or suppose the HE trigger spreads un-fissioned radioactives from a dud over an entire city thereby rendering it a total usage write off? Is that "failure"?
And what I call trolling is using a sentence like:
"The bomb in the picture sure is cute though. Looks like something you'd find in a Japanese cartoon." in conjunction with the device that burned Nagasaki and all those in it.
RE #36 1 Plutonium makes a more efficient, smaller bomb.
2 It is easier to make a gun bomb with U235 but its a LOT harder to isotopically separate 235 than to chemically separate pu from reactor fuel.
3 Keeping weapons grade U235 secure is thus critical to prevent small group bom making.
@6 Purpoise
I'm confused! Please explain.
A sobering, yet entertaining movie on the U.S.' nuclear weapon history is TRINITY & BEYOND: THE ATOMIC BOMB MOVIE. There's a great interview with Dr. Teller explaining why he helped create the weapons he did. It may sound boring, but its one of my favorite documentaries. As a kid who grew up in the Cold War, it helped explain how something so monstrous could be created, and the innocence, and good intentions, that went into it. Oh yeah, William Shatner narrates, too!
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