Make your own A-bomb off the the Internet

[benburch]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20050526-22092900-bc-russia-nuclearsecurity.xml

Make your own A-bomb off the the Internet

MOSCOW, May 26 (UPI) -- Russia and the United States agree -- even those who hardly know any laws of physics can make an atomic bomb with the help of instructions on the Internet.

The Russian Council for foreign and defense policy and Harvard University presented a 120-page report titled "Securing the Bomb 2005: The New Global Imperatives," the Russian newspaper Pravda said.

The report, prepared by Harvard professors Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, has been recognized as the first targeted work on the issue of the nuclear terrorism.

Sam Nunn, the former Democratic senator from Georgia and the author of a well-known project about initiatives for the reduction of nuclear threat, presented the document in Washington at the beginning of this month, Pravda said. "Securing the Bomb 2005" has been recently presented in Russia as well.

Making a nuclear bomb is not a hard task to do, Pravda said. U.S. specialists conducted a special experiment, in which two men, who were hardly familiar with laws of physics, made a nuclear bomb only with the help of instructions, which they found on the Internet.

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[meegbear]

1. Holy Bono!

[Ksec]

2. sweet.. now I can make one and blow up my obnoxious neighbor :)

[Massacure]

3. Nuclear bombs are relatively strait forward to put together

Getting the materials is the pain in the ass.

[oneighty]

4. Being an ex-navy

nuclear weapons disposal technician I doubt it. I know that I could not do it and I know how fission and fusion bombs work.

Not to worry over these scary claims. Years ago a college student made the same type of claim. He sold a book and caused a great stir in the press, especially 'Readers Digest'.

180

[hunter]

7. A modern high efficiency weapon is not comparable...

...to something like the bomb over Hiroshima, or lower tech designs.

Here's a BBC link with actual instructions for a low tech design:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A676352

In my own experience this one would take a bit of practice before you could get it to work properly. I think the design would be very fussy, and misfires would make a big mess. You'd want to test it out with some other heavy metal besides U-235 quite a few times just to make sure you were doing it right.

And, to quote from the above article, "It could be noted at this point that the Hiroshima bomb was only about 2% efficient, 98% of the fissile material was blasted away from the critical mass by the initial nuclear explosion, thus stopping the chain reaction long before it attained its maximum capacity."

Modern high efficiency bomb designs do not have that problem, but they are much more difficult to build, which was one reason for all that testing the USA and USSR did.

Furthermore, I'll speculate that there is a lot of very deliberate (and subtle) misinformation out there on the internet, of the sort that would be very dangerous to any amateur atomic bomb builders.

This article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about apartheid South Africa's nuclear bomb is a pretty good one to give you some idea of what's involved:

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ja94albright

It's very relevant to current discussions about Iran.

:hi: (Obligatory wave to "Agent Mike.")

[oneighty]

8. Nonsense

The 'British plan' is nonsense. What grade of Uranium enrichment? How many pounds of Uranium? How is the Uranium shaped? How is the Uranium machined to shape? What is the detonation rate of the propellant? What is the neutron source made of? What is the timing mechanism to active the neutron source at the proper point in time?

Sometimes I think this sort of information is floated out to keep us living in fear of Joe Blow down the street making an Atomic Bomb in his garage. If bombs were this simple to make Every country in the world would have nuclear bombs-even Iraq.

Going on to more sophisticated bombs requires plutonium, tritium, deuterium and other unusual things.

180

[Media_Lies_Daily]

5. You should have a couple of goons knocking on your door real soon....

...even though anyone with half a brain knows that making a nuclear weapon from instructions on the Internet is completely impossible.

[Squeegee]

6. You mean, instructions like these?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/world/2003/nuclear_fuel_cycle/mining/default.stm

[Tesha]

9. Given access to highly-enriched uranium, anyone could build a "gun"-type..

Given access to highly-enriched uranium, anyone could build a
"gun"-type bomb. It might not be efficient, but as was pointed
out in an earlier reply, neither was the bomb that destroyed
Hiroshima.

(By the way, you all know that the US didn't even bother to test
a prototype of "Little Boy", the gun-type bomb that was used against
Hiroshima, right? The mechanism was so straight-forward that there
was no doubt among the engineers and military types that it would
go bang. And it did. By comparison, the "Fat Man" plutonium implosion
weaopn used against Nagasaki was a much-more complicated device; those
are the bombs that are hard to build, requiring nanosecond timing and
precise explosive "lenses" and the like. But gun-types are trivial.)

It's only the lack of access to uranium that keeps us from seeing our
cities vaporized, or at least highly irradiated.

Tesha