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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.'"
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 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.
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
So maybe this is a case for Mythbusters?
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.
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*