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I suspect Homeland Gestapory won't much care about this guy's model except for the bad press he generated. Doing something bad? No big deal. Making the gooberment look bad? Big deal.

Want to give them more signal with their noise? Here's a good start:

http://www.atomicmuseum.com/store/enterquantity.cfm?ItemID=255&Category=179

  Historic Atomic Bomb Blueprints

Set of five (5) individual blueprints of early atomic weapons. These were copied from the original government drawings on to bright white paper, and are bound for you in a "contractor's pack."

Each page measures 16" X 22". Included are dimensional drawings of Fat Man (2), Little Boy (1), and the Mark IV Missile (2).

Set of Five $15.00

http://www.atomicmuseum.com/store/ProductItem.cfm?Category=179

TFA said he uncovered that the Little Boy diameter was 28" rather than 29" - so, I'm not speaking for the accuracy of these blueprints - just letting people know that they're out there.

Frankly, from the account given in the article of the hissy fit that he threw when at the museum in Albuquerque, I wonder about the guy. The museum's always been pretty cool, and back in 93 when he visited it, it was at KAFB. The docents and staff have always been very friendly and helpful, and the displays while at KAFB were surprisingly frank and open.

from Google: Fat Man and Little Boy

"...and he notes that the problem is largely with C/C++ and mostly because of the buffer overflow problems."

I haven't been to Trinity Site (yet...), but I'm told they gathered up as much of the trinitite/atomsite as possible and stored it in 50 gallon drums. That said, if you go to the White Sands Missle Range Museum you'll find a few pieces in a glass display case in a small room near the back. IIRC, the same room had parts from the bunkers too.

If you are EVER close enough to pay a visit, DO IT. The New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo and the National Atomic Museum in Albequerque are other "nearby" must-sees.

According to this page the museum on Kirtland AFB is being combined with the National Atomic Museum. I am pretty sure they were separate entities before, but both rocked. I'm sure they will only become better. I hope they keep the two B28 bombs from the Palomares, Spain collision on display.

According to the Linear impact risk page, the total impact energy for 2004FH would be 380Kilotons of TNT, i.e. about 30 Hiroshima bombs.

High in the atmosphere - Hmm, is the EMP effect from a nuclear airburst actually dependent on the energy source being nuclear?

We didn't invent the Atomic Bomb? That's funny, I always thought we did. Granted the Germans beat us to Jet Engines and Rockets and the first computer was invented by the Brits for the purpose of cracking codes during WW2 but if we didn't invent the A-bomb then who do you think did?

There's really only one choice for road food. You have to eat at the Frontier if you want to get your full dosage of what the people of Albuquerque are like. It's on Central right across from the University. Ask any local and they'll tell you exactly where it is. The Route 66 cafe is also good, as is the May cafe, if you like Vietnamese food. The most important thing to remember about food in Albuquerque is that the food here is spicy; green chiles dominate the menu. So if you have an ulcer, you're not going to have a good time, but if you have a good stomach, you'll love it.

For sightseeing, you've got to head up to Sandia Ridge, either via the Tramway, or via the back road through Tijeras. Great view. If you head into town a bit early, which it sounds like you will if you're coming from Roswell, check out the acquarium and botanic garden down near the Rio Grande. The moon jelly exhibit in and of itself is worth the cost of admission. Also worth checking out is the National Atomic Museum. Most guides have its location as being on the Air Force base, but it's moved across town, due to post-9/11 hysteria.

As far as the rest of your trip, definitely sounds like a great journey. Make sure to take the side roads out of Kingman, for whichever way you decide to get out to Vegas. Going over the Hoover dam is great, and you've got to take the tour; fascinating stuff. Though if you don't want to take the dam tour, I'd recommend taking old route 66 over into Oatman and taking 95 up into Vegas. It's slow, but it's a great drive through stark scenery on a wonderfully old, windy, mountain road.

Good luck on your trip. You may want to bring your laptop, if just to use to dump all your photos. Trust me, you're going to be taking a lot of them on that route.

I know someone who dragged his new bride here for his honeymoon. He's not a geek though so I won't nominate him :)

Hopefully not, nuclear weapons with a range of just a couple of miles such as the Davy Crockett don't sound like a very good idea to me..

So? (I assume your argument is that the decision to build was wrong because building things that go BOOM is Morally Naughty for sufficiently-loud values of BOOM :-)

Suppose that the Pentagon had looked forward and decided not to build - or that the physicists at the Manhattan Project had forseen the destructive power of such a device and "gone on ethical strike", perhaps by pretending not to have figured out the theories of radiation hydrodynamics that ultimately became the Teller-Ulam device?

Do you honestly believe that Stalin, (being the wonderfully-enlightened pacifist we know him to be from his historical record), would have made the same abstraction, and decided not to direct his scientists to build it?

Teller's sense of "build it first, let the ethicists worry about what to do with it later" may offend you, but IMHO his judgement with respect to the Soviet regime's intentions at the start of the Cold War was bang-on.

A deeper question: If Teller was wrong in his support for development of the H-Bomb to counter a perceived Soviet nuclear weapons development threat, was Einstein wrong when he wrote his famous letter (Page 1 and Page 2) to Roosevelt in August of 1939, prompting the Manhattan Project as a counter to a possible Nazi bomb? It's not because we were at war with the Nazis - World War II wouldn't start for another month.

So? (I assume your argument is that the decision to build was wrong because building things that go BOOM is Morally Naughty for sufficiently-loud values of BOOM :-)

Suppose that the Pentagon had looked forward and decided not to build - or that the physicists at the Manhattan Project had forseen the destructive power of such a device and "gone on ethical strike", perhaps by pretending not to have figured out the theories of radiation hydrodynamics that ultimately became the Teller-Ulam device?

Do you honestly believe that Stalin, (being the wonderfully-enlightened pacifist we know him to be from his historical record), would have made the same abstraction, and decided not to direct his scientists to build it?

Teller's sense of "build it first, let the ethicists worry about what to do with it later" may offend you, but IMHO his judgement with respect to the Soviet regime's intentions at the start of the Cold War was bang-on.

A deeper question: If Teller was wrong in his support for development of the H-Bomb to counter a perceived Soviet nuclear weapons development threat, was Einstein wrong when he wrote his famous letter (Page 1 and Page 2) to Roosevelt in August of 1939, prompting the Manhattan Project as a counter to a possible Nazi bomb? It's not because we were at war with the Nazis - World War II wouldn't start for another month.

How crazy was Project Chariot? Consider the fact that Bikini Atoll is now one of the best sites for skin diving and sport fishing on the planet. (Read that as "lots of shipwrecks in pristine condition" and a nearly-undisturbed environment for the past 40 years.) The most serious radiological contaminant on Bikini is Cs-137, and the main reason it's a problem is because the local vegetation picks it up in place of potassium. It's a land problem, not a sea problem. Since a putative Alaskan harbor isn't a likely site for crop-growing, and since it would have been excavated with high-yielding thermonuclear devices designed to maximize explosive yield and minimize heavy radionuclide production, the residual radiation levels around the site would have dropped to habitable levels relatively quickly. (Of course, whether it would have cooled off in time to be economically viable compared to conventional construction, or even whether or not a harbor would have benefited the Alaskan economy is a question for economists, not physicists :)

IMHO the best use for nuclear explosions would have been Project Orion; a nuclear pulse engine. Another cool project killed by the ignorance of the public when it comes to things nuclear.

Teller has every right to be bitter. It appears from the article that many people are unable to separate the man from the device he helped build. In an age in which the public is so frightened of the word "nuclear" that they argue to ban space probes like Cassini due to their RTGs, and in which people prefer the cyanide in apricot pits to chemotherapy "because it's the natural way to fight caner", it's not surprising that Teller's vision of the application of technology to build a better world is viewed as hubris, and his contributions are held in low esteem.

Back to nukes. Anyone interested in the history of atomic weaponry should consider a visit to the National Atomic Museum in New Mexico. The timing is great - the first weekend of October also marks the date on which White Sands Missile Range opens up the Trinity Site to the general public, allowing tours of the site of the first fission explosion.

Finally - whatever your opinions on the horror of the bomb's use - the physics behind it was still beautiful. Anyone wanting more detailed information on the design is highly encouraged to read Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ - a 14-part document also available at the FAS High Energy Weapons archive.