HOWTO Build a Nuclear Device

[Ken Brown]

A propaganda weapon doesn't have to work, it just has to present a
threat of working to people who may or may not understand how it is
meant to work. It doesn't have to be a credible military weapon. A
kamikaze airliner isn't a credible *military* weapon against anyone who
can afford artillery. That didn't stop them though.

The tall pipe that others mentioned would work well enough to scare
people - all you need to do is find a way of convincing others that
you've done it. One idea was to set one up in a tall block of flats. You
know the sort where there is a 6-inch gap between flights of stairs in
the stairwell, so if you stand at the top and look down you see right to
the basement. There are abandoned 19 or 20 story blocks in grotty
suburbs of London with stairwells like that, I bet the same is true of
most big cities. You only have to break in for a single day.  You set a
number of lumps of U one above the other in such a way that when a
higher one falls onto one below it will take it with it - maybe just tie
them to the railings with thread, and put some old metal plates in the
way to stop them bouncing out of the stack. Use lumps of lead for
testing.

The topmost one can be released by any simple mecahnism. You then assert
publically that when the top one is dropped they will all cascade down
and assemble a critical mass on the floor below.   Hey presto, one big
propaganda coup, one mass panic and evacuation of big city. The building
will probably still be standing after it goes off, or fails to, but who
will want to be first in?

Ken Brown


"Karsten M. Self" wrote:
> 
> on Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 12:24:31AM -0800, Tim May (tcmay at got.net) wrote:
> > On Friday, November 16, 2001, at 08:20 PM, !Dr. Joe Baptista wrote:
> 
> > > Anyone on this planet can build a nuclear device.  So the only issue
> > > in building the device is the will to die for a cause.  And the only
> > > thing I find unfortunate in all of this is that there are so many
> > > causes that people are willing to die for.  And war will not make
> > > those reasons go away - it will only encourage them.
> >
> > It's really _not_ this easy. It took China and India a while before
> > they successfully tested an A-bomb (many years after they had the raw
> > materials from their reactor programs). It may have taken the South
> > Africans and Israelis a few years after getting materials, too. So,
> > why didn't they just hammer U-235 into stainless steel mixing bowls
> > and do it the way "anyone on this planet can build a nuclear device,"
> > one wonders.
> 
> This analysis neglects consideration of several points:
> 
>   - Nation-states (even authoritarian ones) will likely want to create
>     both a sustained program, not merely crank out a few crude nukes,
>     and preserve the talent involved.  One-offs are almost always easier
>     to complete than a production effort, but the lowered total cost is
>     offset by a higher unit cost.  The terrorist organization can
>     accomplish its goals with crude tactics and marginally effective
>     devices.  Credible military threat isn't as simple.
> 
>   - Credible military weapons have minimum requirements of both efficacy
>     -- efficient use of supercritical energy -- and predictability --
>     having the damned thing go off in the silo / bunker / hanger /
>     munitions dump rather than the chosen target isn't particularly
>     useful.