How a truck driver learned to build an atom bomb
Joshuah Bearman says:
A New Yorker story about home grown atom bombs! Or really, a home grown atom bomb researcher -- a truck driver who single-handedly reconstructed the still classified construction of Little Boy and Fat Man.How A Truck Driver Learned to Build An Atom BombWhat I love about this particular piece is the motivational parallels between Coster-Mullen and the origins of the bomb he wants to recreate. It was the pure pursuit of knowledge that led to the atom bomb. Physicists wanted to understand how the universe worked at the atomic level, and there happened to be some very serious consequences to unlocking the secrets of the grand watchworks. Now, Coster-Mullen, has dedicated himself to understanding the mechanical watchworks of Little Boy. There is no motivation beyond knowing, but that pursuit too has some potentially serious consequences.
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I can't for the life of me rember the the name of the book where this story came from but back in 1945 Congress debated the use of atomic weapons; before the debate pamphlets showing the how to where passed out to every one. All but two where hastily retrieved. Major oops there.
...This puts a new spin on a certain verse of the classic song Convoy
"Them Smokeys wuz thick as bugs on a bumper
They even had a Bear in the air!
I sez 'Callin' all trucks, this here's the Duck
We'z about to go a-huntin Bear!'"
...Truckers with nukes. That would make even Buford T. Justice think twice about setting up a speed trap, wouldn't it?
Great, but can he reconstruct peace? We could use some.
this gives me an idea....
Rather than constructing a tedious bonmb that blows craters in the ground and vaporizes people, why not make some money?
A basic stock market /real estate fraud: The apparent event is a dirty bomb event that wrecks a city. In fact, it's a very minor conventional explosion seeded with minimal radioactives and supplemented with numerous small pockets of minor radioactives at monitoring points. The actual damage is minimal, the cost low. But the media coverage and intital panic should allow opportunity to "buy low and sell high". Would have to move very quickly, but if your ill gotten gains could be moved to a location safe from justice(Crawford?), it'll work.
I read Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid
http://www.amazon.com/Mushroom-Bomb-Aristotle-Michaelis-Phillips/dp/0868882429/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230077134&sr=1-1
sometime in the 80s. About the author some here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Aristotle_Phillips
The bit in the book that sticks with me is how easily the author got DuPont to explain to him how to create very high pressure densities with TNT. Sort of my first introduction to the idea of social engineering and its implications for practical information security.
I liked the cartoon. I assume it is funny because I didn't get it.
Billy Bob Thornton should play this guy in the movie version, something like the "The Bomb Builder Taxi Driver."
Or "Sling Bomb." "Sorta' shaped like a mushroom, mmm hmm."
"Billy Bob Thornton should play this guy in the movie version, something like the "The Bomb Builder Taxi Driver.""
...Nah, you've got to cast someone more inbred and redneck looking. Thornton just looks down-and-out.
Truck driver builds atom bomb?
You ought to see my plumber's phased-array radar!
Coster-Mullen's book is GREAT. My father-in-law has been reading it for two days. We'll be privileged to have it in the Prelinger Library.
I am astounded at how proficient this guy is at deducing the workings of a classified and very complicated mechanical device. If only he could have used his ability to discover something a little more useful than writing a technical manual for a bomb that has been obsolete for 60 years.
Jetfx writes:
This is tremendously important work John's doing.
There's a persistent myth - in nonproliferation circles, policy analysis circles, political leaders, and the general public - that nuclear weapons are really really hard to understand and build.
The truth is that it was hard to figure out if they could be made at all, and hard to make them conveniently small the first time. Once that was done, once information leaked out on how that was done, the rest is relatively easy.
John's pointing this out, by reverse engineering Little Boy a bit at a time. He's a little obsessive about it... but it's an important obsession, because it stands right up in the face of the myth.
FTA:
"Among other things, Coster-Mullen’s book makes clear that our belief in the secrecy of the bomb is a theological construct, adopted in no small part to shield ourselves from the idea that someone might use an atomic bomb against us. Surely, hostile powers could easily obtain the kind of information that Coster-Mullen has acquired, however painstakingly, in his spare time. Any nation that can master the challenges of the atomic-fuel cycle and produce a critical mass of uranium or plutonium, as Iran is reported to be on the verge of doing, would have little difficulty in producing a workable bomb. Given a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, a small number of engineers working for a terrorist group like Al Qaeda or Hezbollah could easily assemble a homemade nuclear device."
HALLE-FREAKIN-LUJAH HO-FREAKIN-SANNAHS TO THE FREAKIN HIGHEST.
"The point is to keep the bombs out of sight, to make us feel that the bombs aren’t real, and that is John’s real contribution. The notion that we are safer because we have all these bombs tucked away is a huge fraud."
ANGELS HERALDING THE PRESENCE OF DIVINITY
"They proved in a test that you can use reactor-grade plutonium in a bomb," - a deflagration and/or radiation flash bomb, where there is a small sub-sonic explosion that doesn't spread much material and doesn't release much energy before the material blows itself apart - thereby stopping the chain reaction - or a flash bomb, which is basically a small-area radiation pump, which requires nothing more than making two sub-critical piles and bringing them together in the presence of the people you want to die slowly, the way Daghlian and company died.
This man is absolutely correct: There are many ways to achieve a goal, and the road map to get you there is available to anyone capable of mastering some calculus and physics facts. The details of the interior of the first atom bombs won't keep people from building their own weapons.
Some of the comments above seem to be missing an important point. Building the actual bomb is the easy part. Enriching uranium is the really, really, really hard part. The uranium is what prevents atomic bombs from being in everyone's arsenal. No one individual can do that - it requires a huge amount of money and resources and, of course, access to the uranium to start with.
And the fact that reactor-grade plutonium could potentially be built into a bomb doesn't mean it will be. If you obtained access to the stuff, you would then have to engineer an entirely new bomb to use it - and that would again be a hugely complicated affair.
Sorry but I'm not buying all this talk about such bombs being easy. Nothing about this means we shouldn't continue to be vigilant about tracking the potential sources for such a weapon.
Icky
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1859560.stm
http://www.bu.edu/globalbeat/nuclear/FPRI042701.html
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1996_hr/s960320c.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nukes/
And of the initial two bomb designs, Little Boy was a far simpler design. It was simple enough that we never tested it. The only one that we had was dropped on Nagasaki. Implosion weapons are more difficult, but can use a critical mass made of plutonium, which is alot easier to refine. ISTR that South Africa went with a gun design, while India, Pakistan and the Norks went with implosion devices.
The most obvious question I have is: "What do you do with it after you build it?" So, great you have an atom bomb in your basement. Oh.... wait... I'VE GOT AN ATOMIC BOMB IN MY BASEMENT! Oh shi....
Somewhat tangentely related, I recommend reading "The Radioactive Boy Scout", a true story of a kid that took his nuclear power merit badge program to extremes.
http://www.amazon.com/Radioactive-Boy-Scout-Frightening-Homemade/dp/0812966600/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230094454&sr=8-1
I second #18's suggestion, quite a captivating read.
Also, thanks #5, I will be looking into that one...
Like everyone has said, it shouldn't be that hard to create the basic bomb. Getting the raw materials would be the hard part.
Reading about the atomic testing and things, I was much more surprised about the creation and testing of the fusion based weapons. It seems scientists really didn't understand what they were doing until well into the 60's. Seeing video of Russia's Tsar bomb is just mind numbing. It doesn't even seem real.
It also reminds me of the Sliders episode were they find an Earth were all nuclear experiments failed (due to intentional miscalculation of the scientist).
in Russian,raw materials Come to you!
For Binaryloop
Ask Raven what to do with it,,,
@13 Bardfinn
Your comments lately have really caught my eye; I wish I could give you whuffies for them.
Anyway, specifically as a follow up on
I hope I'm not the only one who remembers circa 1997 when the detailed plans of "how to build Fat Man and Little Boy" were published online. Perhaps the plans were from a copy of the book Coster-Mullen has drafted over time.So, in a sense, I thought this was "old news" or merely a natural progression of that. Though I also recognize that many people have bought into all that "post-9/11 world" claptrap and suddenly this seems way more scary to them than it used to.
But seriously people, this is a half-century old technology. Of course anyone with half a brain plus the time and interest to do so is going to figure it out.
forgot my link (its the ichornog)
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/01/europe/EU-GEN-Norway-Russia-Nuclear.php
Great read. Also very nice to be reminded of Gene Smith's photography.
Remember this: "A Walk To Paradise Garden"
Fissionpunk!
Ichornog, don't spill it, it's even stickier than normal!
Fascinating. New-Yorker class writing. And Coster-Mullen sounds as fascinating as his subject. Keep your trainspotting.
Great article Mark--the guy in the article takes the DIY philosophy to an awesome (if not frightening) extreme, and I salute that.
However, I take exception with the following bit in Joshua's intro:
"What I love about this particular piece is the motivational parallels between Coster-Mullen and the origins of the bomb he wants to recreate. It was the pure pursuit of knowledge that led to the atom bomb. Physicists wanted to understand how the universe worked at the atomic level, and there happened to be some very serious consequences to unlocking the secrets of the grand watchworks."
To call the Manhattan Project "the pure pursuit of knowledge" isn't just a euphemism, it's plain false. The United States government did not marshal the talents of the most brilliant physicists in the world for the sake of discovery or enlightenment--they wanted to build an incredibly powerful weapon that would bring a decisive end to WWII and subsequently give their military a qualitative edge over every other country in the world. Even many of the physicists involved in the project, especially John von Neumann, were supportive of the destructive capabilities of the device they were creating:
"With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when. [...] If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" (von Neumann, attribution unknown)
In fact, what I would say is most extraordinary about Coster-Mullen is that he truly did do it for the science, for the "love of the game." If only the same thing could be said about the bright minds at Los Alamos. What a pity that our government only takes science seriously when national security or pride (e.g. the space race) are on the line.
The USA nuked Japan (twice!) not to force a surrender so much as to scare the shit out of the Russians (and prevent Soviet occupation of Japan).
Which is why the USA will feel awfully stupid when the Large Hadron Collider uncovers some fundamental aspect of our physical universe leading to sustainable fusion reactions or faster-than-light space travel.(Hmm... spend $3 trillion on occupying Iraq, or 1/500th that on a revolutionary particle accelerator...)
it's OK Zuzu, the moment it looks like a discovery might create advantage, they can always bomb the accelerator.
I don't remember the names, but there was an experiment (in the 50s, I think) to see if any old off-the-shelf physics PhDs could figure out how to build a nuke from scratch and from what was out in the popular press about how they worked.
Long story short: They could.
Also, my physics prof in uni also worked at Los Alamos (as in, he was an active researcher there). One day in class (physics for idiots--it was still one of the most interesting classes I took, and he was a great teacher and a funny guy and I learned a lot), he goes, "Okay, and now I'm going to explain to you how to build a nuclear bomb." And he did. It was a great lecture that tied together everything we'd learned, from Newtonian through nuclear physics. As a teacher myself now, I have to say that this is one of the best examples of pulling a class together for the big payoff at the end of the semester I've ever seen.
Anyway, the point he made at the beginning and the end was, "there's no harm in telling you how to do this, because it isn't the concept that's difficult; it's getting the timing on the implosion right, figuring out the critical mass, and then getting the fissionable material." It's getting or making the enriched uranium or plutonium that is difficult, requiring access to really insanely expensive hardware.
The technology for setting the thing off is no biggie (especially for Little Boy), but good luck with the active ingredient!