HOW TO MAKE AN ATOMIC BOMB (Part 33)

The following is Part 33, excerpted from Chapter 1 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity:

How to Make an Atomic Bomb

It’s true, you can go to the internet and find out how to make an atomic bomb, at least, all disclaimers aside, with the principles to guide you. The wild card is the billion dollar price tag, which is conservative.

The literature says that all you need to do is to shape 110 pounds of Uranium 235 into a sphere with a small piece missing, and use a conventional explosive bullet detonator to shove the absent portion of the material into the ball to attain critical mass. Other guides suggest that 10 pounds of U235 might be sufficient. The explosion itself occurs in one millionth of a second. Little Boy on Hiroshima was of this type. If you need to start with the uranium ore, you also must separate the good stuff, U235 (about 0.6%), from the waste, U238, which is over 99% the batch. Thus, begin with 18 million pounds of crude uranium ore to obtain the required amount of U235 through a simple three step process of gaseous diffusion, magnetic separation and gaseous centrifugation. Harold Urey, who had in 1931 won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating the existence of heavy water, was instrumental in devising the gaseous diffuser to separate U235 from U238, and later again gained fame when his graduate student, Stanley Miller, formed amino acids in a flask with water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen and lab lightning.

Clearly, then, terrorists will not be setting up a mining operation. All they need to do is steal or purchase enriched uranium or plutonium. While the 1974 days of Karen Silkwood at the Kerr-McGee plant in Oklahoma are over, where 40 pounds of plutonium were supposedly lost, either Israel, the CIA or terrorists did steal some plutonium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation in Pennsylvania. Nonweapons grade U-235 can be purified with centrifuges, certainly within the capability of a lab in the desert. Weapons grade U-235, reportedly, can be purchased on the black market. The accessible spots are the former Soviet nations, but North Korea, apparently, is now out of the business. Syria? Well, Israel kiboshed that attempt, but Iran? Someday, maybe.

Only 22 pounds of Plutonium 239 can also be used, but that’s another process requiring a nuclear reactor, implosion and a U238 casing. Detonation occurs in one ten-millionths of a second. The process is difficult and uncertain. The first version of this bomb was The Gadget at Trinity on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico and second was Fat Man three weeks later on Nagasaki. An audition was necessary because scientists did not know for sure if this concept was going to work. Little Boy was a sure thing because of the type of technology.

With tongue firmly in cheek, an unacknowledged how to do it guide also pondered the psychological state of a possible American terrorist:

o Subscribes to one or more of the following: Soldier of Fortune, Hustler, Popular Mechanics, Self.

o I am my own best friend.

o I have seen the movie, Deer Hunter, more than once.

o I have read evidence that solar energy is a Communist conspiracy.

There were several more, but you get the point, of course. Don’t you?

The best brains on Earth in the Forties spent the 2007 equivalent of $23 billion ($2 billion then) to hit the nuclear jackpot three straight times. Can a terrorist group today repeat this act?

-

785: 140

-