Former Truck Driver Reconstructs A-bomb 332
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.'"
The real secret of the bomb .. (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:whoa! (Score:4, Informative)
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 [google.com]
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels [newyorker.com]
http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/how-john-coster-mullen-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-reverse-engineer-the-bomb_b6222 [mediabistro.com]
http://docs.nrdc.org/nuclear/files/nuc_04110001a_024.pdf [nrdc.org]
Re:2004 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Reconstructs A-bomb? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:It's a Little Boy gun-type bomb (Score:4, Informative)
It's a little bit more complicated than that. The average time between neutron emissions in the fissile material for a gun-type bomb has to be substantially longer than the assembly time. Otherwise you'll get predetonation and the device will fizzle. If the design doesn't incorporate a neutron source, the parts will just sit there until there's finally a spontaneous emission that can start a chain reaction.
To avoid that unpredictable delay, during which the pieces might move back out of perfect alignment, real-world gun-type designs have incorporated neutron sources that release extra neutrons at just the right moment. The most common design uses an explosion to mix polonium and beryllium, which then release enough neutrons to trigger the reaction. That kind of neutron generator was used in the Little Boy device.
Re:whoa! (Score:2, Informative)
They don't because, in their eyes, a foreign-backed foreign power is usurping what used to be their land.
Key words are in bold.