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"Nuclear Archaeology" Inspires Replica of Hiroshima's Little Boy
James Cho writes "Through a decade of painstaking reverse engineering, trucker John Coster-Mullen built the first accurate replica of the Hiroshima bomb. His work yielded a new history of the first nukes, 'Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man,' with historian Robert Norris saying, 'Nothing else in the Manhattan Project literature comes close.' Philip Morrison, one of the physicists who helped invent the bomb, deemed it 'a remarkable job.'"
According to Amazon, his book was published in 2002. If they were going to lock him up, they've had plenty of time to do so already.
Of course, it's a good thing for him his name is John Coster-Mullen instead of, oh, say, Ahmed al-Rashad. You can pretty much guarantee that in the latter case, even if all the other circumstances were exactly the same, he'd have been disappeared a long time ago.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This was precisely America's attitude about nuclear weapons for more than thirty years after Trinity.
Turns out they were wrong. There was no way to say England yes, France no, India yes, Pakistan no, Israel yes, Iran no.
The Atomic Bomb created the sense in American leaders that our overwhelming advantage in power created an American hegemony.
Like the Jurassic Park geneticist believing his "sterile" dinos would not spread, Truman and subsequent presidents believed in the myth of "control" that would keep the genie in the bottle. Worse, they thought they could be the "decider" of who gets to rub the lamp and who doesn't.
Me, I just hope Fallout 3 doesn't turn out to be predictive. I've run out of Rad-Away.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Get it straight.
The US government does not confirm or deny comments on classified technology. Nuclear weapons are classified. So if you write a book that is full of crap on nuclear bombs, all of the experts will general work for (or have worked for) the government and will not be able to comment on it.
Thus, people who are not in "the know" will read the book and say "Gee, this is really great stuff, very accurate." Meanwhile those who actually work on these weapons and who have security clearances will buy the book, read the book, laugh about the errors with each other... and not talk about it to the general public.
It's easy to be a self-proclaimed expert when all the real experts can't comment and you can't actually demonstrate that your technology works.
And finally, you really think making a bomb is easy if you have the fuel? Do you have personal experience here? Keep in mind you don't get a lot of testing opportunities with these things, and diagnosing what is going on during the explosion is also quite involved. There's a big difference between assembling your nuclear material to generate some nuclear yield and actually generating significant nuclear yield.