"Shopping for Bombs"

(on the subject of books)

Anyone else a bit worried ?

(extract from Gordon Corera's Shopping for bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity And The Rise And Fall Of The Aq Khan Network)

In 1964, a US nuclear lab ran a test to check how far nuclear weapons information had dispersed. It found that two recent PHD students who were not experts had managed to collect enough material to plan a device. In 1977, an undergraduate at Princeton University managed in five months to write a thesis on designing an implosion weapon from publicly available information. This was of course before the internet age. More recently, in 2007, a physics master at a British public school had to remove from a website a step-by-step guide on how the first British atomic bomb was built. And now, thanks to Aq Khan - the designs for a Chinese weapon are thought to be circulating on the black market.

^_^;

 

Any Physics graduate worth their salt would be able to design a fissile weapon. The difficulty is moving from the drawing board to sucessful construction without killing most of the assemblers from radiation sickness or the explosive material used in the detonator. That said, I doubt that would bother the religious terrorists with their deranged belief that with mass murder (aka martyrdom operations) = eternal bliss. I'm just glad that the Crusaders (ie Christian terrorists) didn't have access to these weapons in the middle ages... then again their modern counterparts, do!