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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.'"
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...
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
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.
Not really, everything including technical schematics from the Manhattan Project have been available for decades. The knowledge of how to make a simple gun design device isn't what keeps people from making nukes, it's the availability of highly enriched uranium.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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 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
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).
if he were going to gitmo it would probably have happened sometime in the last decade... this is old news. it's still cool, but it is old.
http://www.google.com/search?q=john+coster-mullen&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels
http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/how-john-coster-mullen-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-reverse-engineer-the-bomb_b6222
http://docs.nrdc.org/nuclear/files/nuc_04110001a_024.pdf
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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
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.
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?
Sorry, you've got it wrong. It's a uranium-type gun-type bomb that is dead simple to build and practically foolproof if you've done the elementary physics and workmanship right. The only hard part with that is getting the highly enriched uranium. A plutonium-based implosion-type bomb is another story. The hollow spherical high-explosive lense and the arrangement of synchronized detonators is very, very exacting, and the very specialized grade of krytron tube to set it off just right so it doesn't fizzle.
Next time one of these guys wants to pass, you'll think twice about blocking the left lane.
Have gnu, will travel.
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. By now, I bet you could print yourself the shaped charge and other components for a kiloton-range fission bomb using a Thing-o-matic. Assuming you had 6.2kg of plutonium (available from N. Korea for a few cases of fine cognac) and the right contacts to get hold of the RDX (the TNT is easy enough to make yourself) you could probably build it for under $20k.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
"There are stories of 'scientists' pushing Uranium samples together with boomsticks during the development of the bomb..." fixed that for ya! ;-)
Have you people even considered that they didn't make an atomic device because they don't want to?
They're people too you know? They want to live their lives like everybody else. They don't because, in their eyes, a foreign-backed foreign power is usurping what used to be their land. So they take violent action against whom they perceive as their enemies and its supporters. But that doesn't mean they'd be willing to detonate nuclear weapons because of that. Why would they contaminate the land they claim as theirs with radiation? Not to mention destroying most it in the detonation itself?
When are people going to understand that terrorism is not a mental condition? It's a way of fighting. Normally used when you're at a very disproportionate disadvantage. Give them a force comparable to the IDF and watch terrorism decline sharply. Hell, why doesn't Israel use their nuclear weapons then? They have them. Because they're the good guys? Or maybe because they don't want to destroy what they're trying to obtain?
*sigh*
If you had to, you could probably disarm a nuke easily enough, or at least, prevent it from going critical. Gun type design you'd simply locate the uranium slug and (carefully) jam a nice thick wad of something between it and the target. Preferably something that would not be easily penetrated by a bullet.
As for an implosion device, even stopping one of the controlled explosions or disrupting the explosive lenses (may look something like a silver soccer ball with wires coming out of each face) so that the pressure was not perfectly spherical could keep the weapon from going critical.
Smashing the shit out of the weapon's innards, as well as pulling wires like mad will probably have some effect, but hammering on fissile material and high explosives is very much not suggested.
Note that even imperfectly detonated nuclear weapons still explode and still release radiation. Terrorists will also likely design their bombs to fail-deadly, instead of fail-safe like military weapons. So unless entirely defused, it will still blow up your block, just not your entire city. After all, nukes are primed by powerful explosives which create a lot of damage in their own right. Therefore, I only suggest the above tactics if the timer is ticking down from 10 seconds and there is no one nearby who knows how to defuse bombs.
Incidentally, this means you will be dead too, but at least you will be able to enjoy the accolades you will get while you are drinking mead in Valhalla.
Well, the Russian design for Joe 1 has been released and since it was a direct copy of Gadget/Fatman that's effectively the same.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Have you people even considered that they didn't make an atomic device because they don't want to?
They're people too you know? They want to live their lives like everybody else.
Even the suicide bombers, the guys who blow themselves up with a bunch of civilians who have nothing to do with anything? Do they just want to live their lives?
But yes, I'm talking about nuclear bombs in NYC or Washington DC, not in the middle east. I certainly do believe that if the same terrorists that hijacked planes and used them as weapons could have made and used nuclear weapons, they would have done so. Yes, it might be hard to smuggle it into the US, but I imagine they can do it, and if the bomb is detected -- detonate it. (It won't be as effective as doing it in Washington DC, but it's still pretty good.)
I believe that the know-how to make nuclear bombs is well known. I believe that the explosives needed to do so are relatively easy to find. But the nuclear material, that must be harder to obtain. And I hope it stays that way, because if the terrorists ever get the ability to make nuclear weapons and blow up a few in key areas -- that would make all the changes that happened after 9/11 look like nothing.