Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: RE: how to make an A-bomb
From: David Farber <dfarber () earthlink net>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 13:44:47 -0500
-----Original Message----- From: "Robert Raisch" <info () raisch com> Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 14:44:40 To: <farber () cis upenn edu> Subject: RE: how to make an A-bomb Dave, As I am sure you know, making an atomic device is much harder than any plans might present. In essence, any design for such a device will describe the combining, under considerable force and within a very short time, enough fissile material to achieve a viable reaction. The key word is 'viable' since the engineering tolerances for such a device must be very precise or else you have a pop rather than a bang. The hardest part of all is acquiring the fissile material, without which the device cannot achieve the economies of scale required for a really satisfying boom. Rather than worry about making such plans freely available, what we should all be very concerned about is the possibility of nefarious persons constructing and delivering a conventional, but "dirty" bomb, one which doesn't need to react but achieves its goals by poisoning a large enough section of geography to make a useful statement. All one needs for such a device is a sizeable quality of commercial grade explosive (which can be whipped up by anyone with a university-level textbook) and several liters of radioactive industrial waste; something much easier to obtain than weapons-grade plutonium. I believe all the handwaving around making such plans public is simply to misdirect attention away from the real source of such problems: shoddy intelligence. It is ignorance rather than knowledge that kills. /rr For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- IP: RE: how to make an A-bomb David Farber (Apr 15)