A truck driver uncovers secrets about the first nuclear bombs (2008)

It&#x27;s worth remembering this the next time you hear some hysteria about Iran&#x27;s &quot;nuclear program&quot; which they have been supposedly working on for the past 30 years without actually producing a bomb.<p>Basic nuclear weapons are really, really simple to build. This is especially true of uranium bombs. Is there any case of a weapon being deployed operationally without ever being test-fired, other than dropping Little Boy over Nagasaki? That&#x27;s how simple uranium bombs are.<p>Gas centrifuges (when not being sabotaged) make uranium enrichment pretty simple, and they have been around since the &#x27;80&#x27;s as a fairly well-understood technology. There were warnings back then that they would lead to a wave of proliferation, which to an extent they have.<p>So the only plausible way Iran could have been &quot;working on&quot; nuclear weapons for 30 years without producing one is if they aren&#x27;t working very damned hard. Their economy is about half the size (GDP per capita) than the US economy was in the early &#x27;40&#x27;s but much more concentrated in terms of the state&#x27;s ability to control it.<p>So it isn&#x27;t lack of resources that is holding things up. It is most likely lack of political will: Iran would like to be seen to be working on a Bomb, but for whatever reason isn&#x27;t actually doing much toward building one. If they were, they would have one by now.<p>A team of competent high school students with a billion dollar budget could manage it in a year.<p>[Edit: this is not a defense of the theocratic monsters that run Iran, I just don&#x27;t think they are as big a nuclear threat as is commonly assumed.]

Wow, I don&#x27;t usually have a problem with the New Yorker, but this is a really patronising and naive profile. He drinks too much Diet Coke? Well, Bill Gates and Karl Lagerfeld also drink too much Diet Coke.<p>Worse than that, apparently he&#x27;s not expected or, really, allowed, to apply basic logic and arithmetic in his research without being subject to ridicule: &quot;It was a typical Coster-Mullen moment: he treats the world’s most destructive invention as an ordinary clocklike mechanism, made of simple parts that must fit together according to readily discernible laws.&quot;<p>Seriously, if there&#x27;s one thing you can say about the Manhattan project, it is that it was an entirely positivistic, scientific activity. The lack of moral or ethical qualms that might be lamented in retrospect doesn&#x27;t change the nature of the weapon. The mechanical aspects of the bomb are just that, mechanical.<p>Kenneth Goldsmith would probably excuse the style of this article as twee, but it feels worse than that. It is corrosively anti-geek.

I bought one of his books on Amazon. Its a lot of fun. And it is interesting to see some of the pictures in his book that were edited in other sources. I can easily recommend it as worth adding to your library on nuclear weapons and their development.

Remarkable story about a remarkable man. If not on HN, I don&#x27;t think I would have stumbled across it. Thank you.

I had not caught this article when it was originally published. Thanks for the share! I really like how one man, with a lot of time on his hands, could reverse engineer the designs of some of the most secret weapons ever created.

Asperger&#x27;s?