Slashdot Mirror
Former Truck Driver Reconstructs A-bomb
mdsolar writes "Coster-Mullen taught himself how to build an A-bomb. 'The secret of the atomic bomb,' he says, 'is how easy they are to make.' His findings are available in a book he continuously updates and publishes himself called Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man, which has received rave reviews from the National Resource Defense Council: 'Nothing else in the Manhattan Project literature comes close to his exacting breakdown of the bomb's parts.'"
I predict a trip to Gitmo!
I just want a backyard nuclear reactor...
How long before his book get's the Anarchist's Cookbook treatment? I expect we'll see new headlines in the coming weeks, reflecting how the government has now classified all his research and writings, and labeled the author as a threat to national security (or as a friend to terrorists and hater of puppies and kittens).
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Former truck driver magically disappears from society after publishing 'how to make A-bomb"
so people I know and would fear if they were wielding a fork can build A-bombs?
It's like the mind going AWOL, it's there somewhere
John Aristotle Phillips tried this 35 years ago. He toured college towns giving lectures shadowed by pro-nuke goons. I saw him once, and the goons. He was quite the nervous fellow.
Both their first bomb tests fizzled with yields about a tenth of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. They had been designed to be Hiroshima-size.
So claiming to be able to make a bomb and actually getting them work properly are two different things.
He didn't reconstruct a bomb, he reverse engineered it and taught himself how to build one.
which are a rather simple design; among other things, they don't have any safety features.
Broadly, what you need is two correctly sized-and-shaped chunks of enriched uranium with enough U-235 to cause a chain reaction, a smoothbore gun barrel (IIRC Little Boy used one of 6" diameter), and some gunpowder in silk bags to drive one piece of uranium into the other. There are a few other parts to this, such as the tamper and the fuze, but the toughest part should be obtaining enough enriched uranium.
Certainly the featured bomb is not a fully-working model. It'll be a reproduction with inert material standing in for the U-235, no gunpowder, and an inert fuze.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
...not just flicking over them with my eyeballs on autopilot. I read "Former Truck Driver Reconstructs A Bomb" and thought - "So what? Is this a particular bomb, a historical bomb or something". It was only about 10 seconds later when my brain caught up and made me re-check what I'd actually read.
Would it really have hurt to add an extra 5 characters into the headline?
So he has one in his garage or something?
There is nothing fundamentally difficult about making an A-bomb, particularly a plutonium-based bomb, except obtaining the fissionable material, handling it, and keeping people from finding out about it.
I'm sure someone up at the NSA is saying to themselves "OK wait, this guy is a truck driver and before that was a photographer....and now he's reverse engineered the goddamn A-bomb??". How is that possible?
Loading...
The difficulty isn't the design, it's getting ahold of enough enriched U-235 to actually have a working bomb.
Simple design, extremely complex materials.
Orwell was an optimist.
He hasn't actually built one, so the only way we would know whether or not he has successfully reconstructed the design would be if someone who actually designs nuclear bombs today were to look at his plans and say that, "Yes, that would result in a functional atomic bomb." Or if someone were to follow his plans, build an atomic bomb and set it off. It is distinctly possible that he has successfully reconstructed the plans, At this point, all we have is his claim that what he put in his book would be sufficient to build a functional atomic bomb.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I was under the impression that although the concept is fairly simple (smash a bunch of uranium together very fast, and it goes supercritical), the tolerances are so tight that it's very difficult to accomplish that electronically/mechanically. If it isn't exactly right, it just melts down spectacularly rather than detonating properly.
I don't know - maybe he's really got it, but I suspect more likely he'd just contaminate a few hundred square miles with radioactive materials if he ever tried building one and testing it.
(offtopic: damn slashdot eats comments in IE. I tried posting a minute ago using the Ajax post form and clicking "preview" just made my comment disappear and I had to retype the whole thing. Is it too much to ask that this website at least WORKS? This isn't nuclear engineering.)
Maybe not, but by leaving them out they've gotten you to share a funny story which brightened up my day.
I seriously doubt that he's figured out to use a Frisbee to spoof the motion detectors to steal super enriched plutonium from John Lithgow's lab. D'OH!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
He built a model, not a bomb. It is made of wood and fiberglass, although it is a very, very accurate historical model. Nothing more than an elaborate historical case study.
It isn't how the bomb is constructed that is the hard part. 'Little boy' was very simple, but very crude. Most of the Uranium in the bomb was wasted because critical mass was not maintained long enough to consume most of the material. The yield of Little boy was only 9-10 kilotons, compared to 12-15 kilotons for 'Fat Man'. The hard part was the processing of the nuclear material to get enough of the high grade stuff concentrated enough to reach critical mass. That's the part you can't do in your garage. If you can steal enough material that will assemble to reach critical mass the rest is easy. During the war we were able to process enough Uranium for but a single bomb, and enough Plutonium for perhaps four. There was a third core available to drop on a third city in Japan if necessary and a forth was a few months away. (The first core was the Trinity test bomb, the second over Nagasaki).
Got some good reviews on Amazon. He self-published and apparently delivers the spiral-bound gems hand signed. I'm thinking the MIB will be visiting him shortly, but if not, it means whatever is in his book is probably not noteworthy.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
Apparently you missed this and this and this and this and this and and and and
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Which 5? "asdfh"?
Avoiding the G-Man: you're doing it wrong
;)
...omic ...
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I heard the physics is easy (basic theory) but the engineering is hard. It takes a lot of development to ensure when bomb is denotated all or most of the fissionable material undergoes reaction (split apart), rather than the TNT simply blows the nuclear material into a big toxic cloud (which is probably just as devastating as a nuclear reaction). Then making the bomb small size and a useful delivery system (i.e. reliable missille that has range, payload, and accuracy). Then there is H-bombs, another host of developmental problems. Of course there are nuclear bombs (though typically called devices) that are very small but these are results of billions of dollars spent by a country with a strong technical base.
On subject of small bombs, there was a bazooka launched a-bomb called the Davy Crockett but the blast area is about the size of the delivery range. Kind of useless like an atomic grenade, you can't throw it far enough away.
As most /. people know the key ingredients are the fissionable materials (U and Pu) which are hard to get, and may be dangerous to handle. Supposably Pu is very toxic, it will kill you by chemical means first before radiation.
In 1970s I heard a story where someone found a chunk of plutonium alongside a road, this person was so pissed off that such material used for A-bombs was found unsecure like a piece of litter, he mailed it to his local congressman with a letter protesting government's lax security for such material. This must me a legend of tall proportions since Pu is toxic.
mfwright@batnet.com
Let me yet again recommend everybody read THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes. The descriptions of what the experience was like, on the ground to survivors of Hiroshima at various radii from the explosion are among the most difficult things I've ever read. I constantly read and hear flip comments about atomic weapons. If you think it's a great opportunity for humor, you're not really familiar with the actual history.
Old news. I already know how to build an A-bomb. I watched "The Manhattan Project" in 1986.
Certainly Coster-Mullen's ambitious project is a neat example of the ingenuity that led America to be the first to develop the atomic bomb. But it's also a stark reminder that our most powerful technologies can end up being reworked and used in other ways, by people much less friendly than truck drivers with lots of time on their hands.
Seriously? Someone spends the time to fabricate a replica from the 1940s, validating historical records in the process, and the author thinks it's time to go all fear-crazed? It's akin to panicking over someone building a blunderbuss - without any black powder - and then saying it would be easy for sea-faring pirates to loot our merchant ships with their increased firepower and malicious ways.
Instructions on how to do this have been available for YEARS! They won't even get you a runner-up in a junior science competition anymore!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Oops, too early for me to be a /. editor too.
"...tomic ..."
I didn't confuse it with the meaning of the article, because this came out a few years ago, and was posted here then too. Only a few things come to mind when I see "truck driver" and "bomb" in the title.
1) Truck driver eats too many beans at a greasy spoon diner, gets food poisoning.
2) The FUD stories just post 9/11 about fuel trucks being hijacked and used as rolling bombs (totally media/gov't driven fiction).
3) The guy who's been researching the WWII atomic bombs in significant detail, and wrote a book.
The first isn't news, because it happens all the time. The second isn't news, because it wasn't news when it was claimed to have happened, but never actually happened. And the third isn't news, because it already was news. Good for him, he wrote a book. And publicity is always nice to have, especially when you're self-published.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Don't try this at home, kids! ;-)
"I'm sure that in 1985, you can buy plutonium at every corner drugstore... in 1955, it's a little hard to come by !"
Seriously, though, atomic weapons are kind of like supersonic jets. They require a fairly high engineering know-how just to make one that barely works at all. To make one that works really well, you need a tremendous amount of know-how (usually gained through repeated attempts), many hours of supercomputer modelling, and highly exotic materials.
Unfortunately, sometimes even a primitive, barely-functional atomic weapon is "good enough".
I've heard glowing reports on the effects of working with fissile materials.
Next time one of these guys wants to pass, you'll think twice about blocking the left lane.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is old, old news.
For a more in-depth story about Coster-Mullen and his pursuit of the A-Bomb, check out this New Yorker article published in December 2008.
Uranium based ones: easy to build, hard to get materials for
Plutonium based ones: relatively easy to get materials for, very hard to build
This has been known for years, nothing much is new here.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The guy had a white collar job for 30 years before being a truck driver for 10. In other words, he (probably) had a college degree, which most truckers probably wouldn't have had. Sigh. I'm not even surprised by what passes for journalism anymore.
You forgot Boosted fission that use Tritium, Deuterium or Lithium deuteride as a boost.
Once Einstein figured out the physics the rest was pretty easy. There are stories of 'scientists' pushing Uranium samples together with broomsticks during the development of the bomb...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You don't have a right to possess the hazardous materials they require though.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like a lot of the commenters here are missing the point. The interesting part of this guy's feat isn't that he reverse-engineered (if that's even the right term) any two atomic bombs, but Fat Man and Little Boy. Apparently, he's the first person to get all of the details of these bombs' inner workings. The difficulty in this isn't the enriched uranium thing (which is what's traditionally the difficult part in building nuclear weapons), the difficulty was in getting all the inner details just right...
From the New Yorker article, here's the one big item of new info he's discovered:
In the standard historical accounts, the way that the bomb's gun mechanism worked was by shooting a cylindrical âoemaleâ uranium projectile into a concave, stationary uranium target. This act of atomic coitus created a mass sufficient to produce a critical reaction. The mass of the projectile was said to be 38.5 kilograms, and the mass of the target was said to be 25.6 kilograms. But no matter how many times Coster-Mullen did the math the numbers never quite worked out in a way that allowed the projectile and the target to fit inside the gun barrel while remaining subcritical.
The source of the error, Coster-Mullen recognized, was an assumption that every (male) researcher who studied the subject had made about the relation between projectile and target. These scholars had apparently been unable to conceive of an arrangement other than a "missionary position" bomb, in which a solid male projectile penetrated a vessel-like female target. But Coster-Mullen realized that a female-superior arrangement - in which a hollow projectile slammed down on top of a stationary cylinder of highly enriched uranium - yielded the correct size and mass.
Now that's a surprise. I wonder why the Manhattan Project did it that way, shooting the larger mass into the smaller mass. Maybe that was to get the assembly to hold together longer while the chain reaction initiated.
(For those of you who slept through the atomic weapons part of high school physics, the Hiroshima bomb was a "gun" bomb, where the tube from an artillery piece was used to fire one subcritical mass of uranium into another subcritical mass, producing a critical mass. That's been an obsolete technology for half a century, because such bombs are so bulky and require much more fissionable material than implosion bombs, but it works. The Trinity and Nagasaki bombs were implosion devices, of course.)
I'm surprised you didn't mention Sum Of All Fears - not the movie (which almost completely missed the point) but the book, which goes into a fair amount of detail as to the exact amount of work it would take to manufacture not just a fission bomb (a la the bombings in Japan) but a two-stage thermonuclear fusion bomb. Even back then (and this was written in 1992) it would have been well within the reach of a moderately wealthy industrialist. ...
FWIW Tom Clancy (the author of Sum of All Fears) worked with actual nuclear weapons experts to make sure the details and procedures he depicted in the book were wrong. He wanted the book to sound correct but not actually be correct. You could say something similar for much of what appears in his techno thriller fiction books, sounds correct but is really quite heavy with artistic license.
If you think knowing how to create an A-Bomb is useful, here are some more "how to do it" items of equal importance and utility!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
At least in my high school physics class. Diagrams and everything, and a wink and a nod to look at Anarchist's Cookbook for more zany projects. Then again, my physics and chemistry teacher was a weird guy. An award winning weird guy, but a weird guy nonetheless. He must have done something right because I still love physics and chemistry and remember a surprising amount of it.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
This appears to describe the original WW2 bombs, which had the advantage of precision machining etc. A few years ago New Scientist published a much easier way to do it, involving a five story building with stairwell and ordinary plastic drainage pipe. IF you had access to a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, their design could be built with ordinary DIY materials over a weekend. It wouldn't make an efficient bomb, but it would take out a few blocks and leave a nasty radioactive mess.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
This is a rehash of a post from 2009:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/01/25/1831240/Nuclear-Archaeology-Inspires-Replica-of-Hiroshimas-Little-Boy
Which referenced a piece written in 2008:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels
Just be careful you don't end up like this guy.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Considering this book was first discussed on Slashdot two years ago, was published nearly seven years ago, and his work was widely discussed on newgroups, forums, and mailing lists where nuclear historians hang out as much as a decade ago...
The government has had plenty of opportunity to do so, and has declined to do so.
Better adjust that tinfoil hat.
Welcome our new truck driveing, nuke makeing overlord. :P
There's some misunderstanding here in these comments. I have his book and what he actually does is document painstaking research into the exact specs on all the bomb's parts down to the diameter of fasteners, etc. He didn't just create a template for a crude uranium-based device. The New Yorker published an interesting article about him in 2008.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
...and it is a f-a-c-i-n-a-t-i-n-g read.
Probably one of the most interesting items in the book was about the first "weaponeer", a fellow who was present at the Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations charged with assembling, testing and arming the devices.
Truly, a special place in history for that guy.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Correction: implosion-type device will STILL go critical during the explosion. It just won't go supercritical and won't spend enough time in this state to generate sufficient amounts of heat for a large explosion.
I.e. you'll get a nuclear fizzle.
Learning how to make the bomb and the theories of how it works is one thing. Actually making one that works is another. Sometimes there are little details that must be just right, but aren't readily apparent in the theories or drawings. The real world is not perfect theory.
I remember hearing about the US government trying to update it's aging arsonal of nuclear weapons and having problems with a certain part. They had the schematic diagrams and knew the materials to make it out of, but it didn't work like the original parts did. The bomb would not work without the part, and we could no longer make the part. Some knowledge was lost over time. It could be something that the engineers at the time knew, but didn't document well enough, or the current material didn't match the original in some subtle but important way. Whatever the cause, it demonstrates that it isn't always as easy as it seems.
I wish I could find some information on this on line. Perhaps my information is incorrect. If anyone is aware of what I am talking about, please give more details.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
I'm lookin at you, Tom Clancy! Sum of All Fears sound familiar?
It seems that chapter explaining how to trigger the chain reaction was read by this *one* guy, who just happened to have picked up a hitchhiker who introduced him to the joys of reading. The guy told the driver NOT to read that chapter, which alas, made it more irresistible to read, like when I told my roommate, We're skipping this part where he slices the cop's ear off. Lo and behold that night said roommate kept hitting the BACK/FORWARD buttons on my remote.
I hope this truck driver won't need to test it in real life, or have kids that play with hammers all day.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
The newer weapon internals are all about the size of a coke can. The rest of the weapon is all electronics ensuring it just don't go boom. Former A.F.S.F.
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
Was he fired for lack of creativity?
One day I'll start actually reading posts, not just flicking over them with my eyeballs on autopilot. I read "I read 'Former Truck Driver Reconstructs A Bomb'" and thought "So what? Isn't that exactly what the headline says?"
"we had airliners for 30+ years before someone thought to use them as a weapon" ...and was successful in the attempt.
Once upon a time there were hijackers who were refused a refuelling because they already had enough fuel for their alleged destination (Paris from North Africa) and the authorities saw through what they were trying.
You come over to meet him and he's not cleaning a firearm. He's double checking the fusing mechanism on his atomic bomb.
core and irradiating themselves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
/sarcasm: I love to see current news like this on Slashdot and CNN.
The interview video on the CNN page was only posted to YouTube nearly two years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xp4KNfBZ3w
...they didn't say, "Ni!" to you?
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
There was a highly controversial issue of Electronics Australia that covered how to make a Gun-type A-Bomb using household materials, and basically converting a house into a big low yield A-Bomb. The literature had been around for years before that, but this article was contentious because it also had a detailed section on how to enrich the Uranium. At the time, I was only about 7, so I didn't understand most of it, and can only vaguely remember the details. Something to do with home-made ruby lasers, centrifuges and the differences between U-232 and U-235. It was fascinating to me at the time. I wonder if I could find an old copy of it at the local library.
This is just some guy's speculation. About as real as the plans for the Starship Enterprise that some people make. Or the drawings I did as an 11 year old of what was inside Steve Austin's bionic arm.
Ironically, the neo-Nazi helps demonstrate my point. Assuming that the neo-Nazi isn't horribly misquoting the Talmud, it does appear that Jews used teach that "gentiles are less than human," but they're getting along with modern democracy just as well as anybody else. Everybody's religious texts say some crazy shit, but we're mostly able to get on with life despite that. There is no reason to think that Muslims are any different.
Your recollection is correct. It was not intended to be a scholarly work, but was intended only to show the average citizen the kind of counterculture information that was already readily available. [Read the FOIA-released FBI documents for hours of informative reading on the topic.]
My point is that this work may meet the same fate: that some knee-jerk response by someone alarmed about the subject of the book may end up causing it to receive the same treatment as the Anarchist's Cookbook. This is clearly a more detailed professional work. If anything, that might scare some people even more.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Refining bomb grade material is hard.
The bomb material has to fit together well. Small discrepencies lower the yield drastically.
Plutonium is very hard to machine. The turnings are extremely toxic, and they are flamable. I think they machined the bomb chunks in an oil bath.
One of the two, don't remember which, has multiple crystal structures, and it spontaneously changes from one crystal form to another depending on the temperature. To prevent this, it has to be alloyed. But you have to choose an alloying material that doesn't interfere with the nuclear reaction too much.
For the implosion type bomb, you have to have precisely shaped explosives -- two different ones, that assemble into a sphere wrapping the hollow sphere of bomb material. These explosives have to be precisely shaped, and be very uniform in shockwave transmission speed. Then you have to set them off at exactly the right time so that they assemble a shock wave that is spherical, directed inward. If using 20,000 fps explosives, and you want a shock wave that is round to within a quarter inch, then the timing has to be uniform to within about a microsecond. This isn't easy.
I don't worry about terrorists assembling their own bomb.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
It makes it sound like he built himself a bomb, where as he was the first to properly document making a bomb, which is a big difference, because I am sure there are still things missing, that you would only know once you created one, like how many times you can wipe your nose, before it starts to bleed because you forgot said protection to handle plutonium etc....
I guess, this is one of those stories that propagates itself (who sent it out there...the feds?)...to the point that it peaks interest in the right people that you want to catch and log, and then follow for your terrorist paper trail.......anyways, I don't think it is such an accomplishment, the accomplishment would be how to get the materials needed seeing as they are all being monitored.