How Easy Is It To Reverse Engineer Atomic Bombs

[jimmy olsen]

This can't possibly be true can it? 

http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-30/tech/vbs.atomic.trucker_1_truck-driver-nuclear-power-atom-bombs?_s=PM:TECH

Former truck driver deciphers top secrets of first atomic bombs

March 30, 2011|By Alex Pasternack, Motherboard editor

Two decades after helping to design the first atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, was asked to describe how he felt after the bomb's first test. "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky," he quoted from the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita, "that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."

When bombs that he helped design were unleashed over two cities in Japan in August 1945, they detonated at temperatures 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun. So began the Atomic Age, a period that would blow apart our ideas about warfare and technology, send the Americans and Russians into a perpetual state of fear, and set the world on a course of nuclear power, the unintended effects of which are being felt once again in Japan.

While the Fukushima disaster reawakens global concerns over nuclear power, the separate but related threat of nuclear weapons has been mostly lost in the shuffle. Political treaties and protected weapons caches aside, there is no telling what North Korea and Iran might do with their atomic caches -- or what a terrorist could do with the right ingredients and know-how.

A lot, says John Coster-Mullen. A former truck driver with no college education, 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."

Last year, Motherboard visited Coster-Mullen to talk with him about his life project: reverse engineering the atomic bombs America dropped on Japan. 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."

After years of research into the bomb's classified plans, Coster-Mullen has been able to create an intensely technical history of the atomic bomb, centered around a detailed explanation of how the bombs were built, including exact dimensions and configurations, inside and out. For almost 10 years, Coster-Mullen painstakingly analyzed photographs and interviewed more than 150 scientists, engineers and others involved in their development. The result is an unprecedented and highly accurate recreation of the bomb on paper, both in its mechanics and history.

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.

[Neil]

The basic idea is simple enough.  The technical expertise to build one is something else.  You need great force and precise timing to properly fission your fuel.  Otherwise, you end up with an explosion that, while significant in conventional terms, is much less than what you would expect from an atomic weapon.

[HisMajestyBOB]

The science is pretty well-known.
I have a book on the Manhattan Project that goes into detail on how they made them.
The tricky parts are the incredibly fine engineering involved in order to get it to work like you want it to. Otherwise you just get a radioactive dud.

EDIT: Also, it's pretty impossible to reverse-engineer atomic bombs after they've been used.

[Josquius]

Aye. But that still doesn't stop the irrational fear of nukes people have.

[Viking]

The science is pretty well-known.
I have a book on the Manhattan Project that goes into detail on how they made them.
The tricky parts are the incredibly fine engineering involved in order to get it to work like you want it to. Otherwise you just get a radioactive dud.

EDIT: Also, it's pretty impossible to reverse-engineer atomic bombs after they've been used.

iirc the the hardest part in making the uranium bomb was building the initiating explosive charge and the hardest part in making the plutonium bomb was getting the neutron source to start firing at a precise enough time to be sure the bomb didn't hit the ground before going off (allowing the nips to reverse engineer it).

[Neil]

iirc the the hardest part in making the uranium bomb was building the initiating explosive charge and the hardest part in making the plutonium bomb was getting the neutron source to start firing at a precise enough time to be sure the bomb didn't hit the ground before going off (allowing the nips to reverse engineer it).

I'm not sure I buy that regarding Fat Man.  I'd be more worried about a slight variance in the pressure on the plutonium then a delay with the neutron source.  They'd already tested the implosion-type anyways, with the Trinity test.

I'm not sure how useful a fizzled bomb would be to the Japanese anyways.  Even if they had the scientific resources to reverse engineer it, a fizzle would still blow the bomb apart.

[Razgovory]

I imagine the hardest part is actually getting the materials.  You can create a "gun" type bomb, much easier then the typical implosion type.  While I doubt any one person could build it, I suspect a major American university could pull it off.

[Ed Anger]

I imagine the hardest part is actually getting the materials.  You can create a "gun" type bomb, much easier then the typical implosion type.  While I doubt any one person could build it, I suspect a major American university could pull it off.

Except Arizona State. They would try to turn it into a bong.

[garbon]

I've never considered truck drivers to be quite friendly.

[Eddie Teach]

In support of garbon's comment, I considered becoming a truck driver for a time. Then I took a trip in my car and realized I fucking hated long road trips.

[garbon]

Meant that not quite.

[Fireblade]

I imagine the hardest part is actually getting the materials.  You can create a "gun" type bomb, much easier then the typical implosion type.  While I doubt any one person could build it, I suspect a major American university could pull it off.

I nodded sagely, then giggled imagining my university trying to build a nuke. It would be disaster of EPIC proportions, not least because we don't have any sort of engineering program. The most technical thing anyone at this place would be able to build out of nuclear bomb parts is some sort of fucked up centrifuge-powered drug machine.

[The Brain]

Little Boy was so simple that they didn't bother to test it before using it.

[Slargos]

Aye. But that still doesn't stop the irrational fear of nukes people have.

Ah, yes. The fear of nuclear weapons is entirely irrational. In fact, we have nothing to fear from them.

[Eddie Teach]

Meant that not quite.

There's no way that would not make a double negative.