May 30, 2019 Submitted as coursework for PH241, Stanford University, Winter 2019
Fig. 1: President Truman signs the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 into law. (Courtesy of the DOE Source: Wikimedia Commons)
After World War 2, the U.S. government recognized the need for tight control over nuclear energy. [1] There was a movement to expand the knowledge about nuclear energy and use it for commercial purposes, but in order for this to happen the materials for and knowledge about bomb making needed to be tightly controlled. In 1946 President Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act, as seen in Fig. 1, to begin this process and establish the Atomic Energy Commission. [1] The act was revised in 1954 to further advance the commercial nuclear energy industry, and more tightly control civilian access to nuclear materials and information. [1]
John Aristotle Phillips was an undergraduate physics student at Princeton University in 1976. [2] He grew up in North Haven, Connecticut, spent two years at the University of California, Berkeley, and then transferred to Princeton. For a term paper in a class during his junior year, Phillips sought to show that nuclear weapons could fall into enemy hands much more easily than people thought. Using just nuclear engineering textbooks and 2 publicly available government documents, Phillips was able to design a nuclear bomb as a part of his paper, and therefore show that any terrorist group or energy nation would be able build a nuclear bomb without classified information. [2] Phillips's bomb design was assessed by nuclear physicist Frank Chilton as very likely to work, and Phillips was quoted as saying, "Its very simple. Any undergraduate physics major could have done what I did." [2]
Phillips's work was concerning to the federal government, who withheld page 20 of his paper, which is the method he came up with for the type of high-explosive component needed to trigger the nuclear blast. [2] The FBI also confiscated the mockup of the bomb he had in his dorm room. Besides the government, Phillips also attracted a lot of attention in the press, which gave him the moniker "The A-Bomb Kid." Phillips had not accessed any secret information in order to design his bomb, but the government had the right to restrict the information anyway because of the "born secret" doctrine of the Atomic Energy Act. The born secret doctrine is a permanent gag order established to restrict all public discussion of an entire subject matter, in this case nuclear weapons. [3] There is currently nothing like it anywhere else in American law, where discussion of publicly obtained information is illegal.
John Aristotle Phillips gained a lot of attention for his term paper that showed making a nuclear bomb wasn't as difficult to learn as previously thought. He attracted new scrutiny to the difficulty of controlling nuclear information, even information that isn't ill-gotten. As the government today has to deal with the control of secret technology besides nuclear weapons, maybe they should look to the born secret doctrine as a way to combat the spread of information about chemical weapons, gene editing diseases, or cyber attacks.
© Ben Gillman. The author warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.
[1] R. Gaertner "The Atomic Energy Act," Physics 241, Stanford University, Winter 2016.
[2] R. Rein "A Princeton Tiger Designs An Atomic Bomb in a Physics Class," People Magazine, 25 Oct 76.
[3] H. Morland "Born Secret," Cardozo Law Review 26, No. 4, 1401 (2005).
restricteddata on August 5th, 2020 at 01:45 UTC »
I've read the paper and interviewed the guy several times (and written about this incident in a forthcoming book). A few corrections/clarifications:
It was never confiscated by the FBI. It was never officially classified in any way. It was removed from general circulation. You need to get permission from the Physics Department at Princeton to see it. But it's not illegal. It is not formally classified in any way.
American nuclear scientists never said it would work, per se — just that it wasn't totally implausible. His advisors — who were prominent and important physicists! — said it was a good paper for an undergraduate. There is no way to tell whether it would work from the paper as it is written; it isn't that kind of paper. It's more of a "how would this work" sort of paper, not a detailed design or simulation. Even weapons designers cannot generally look at a bomb design on paper and say "it will work" — you can say it's plausible, but it takes a lot of calculation (and sometimes, actual testing) to decide whether something would really work, and how well. The paper basically gives the math for thinking that a simple implosion bomb with about 7kg of plutonium in its core, a 3 inch thick tamper, using C4 for the high explosives, might produce a very inefficient (5% or so) plutonium implosion bomb. It's not implausible, but actually knowing whether that would work is hard to say (it is a very crude design, much cruder than those used by states or used in WWII).
He was never contacted by the French, but he was contacted by the Pakistanis. This is where the FBI got involved, because this had implications for whether the Pakistanis were running a covert nuclear program (they were). The French connection is that the French were trying to sell Pakistan nuclear reactors, and the US was considering trying to block the sale on proliferation lines, and that's how this issue became important in Congress (they did block the sale).
He did get an A. It's a good paper on the topic for a college junior in 1976. The only things he has in it that you couldn't get on Wikipedia today are some things that he got on explosive velocities from calling up DuPont and pretending to be a scientist and not a student writing a paper. His other sources are ones you can easily find in a library today, like the Los Alamos Primer (declassified in 1965), John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy (which was sort of an inspiration for him), and various histories of the Manhattan Project work. It is not a template for how to make a bomb. It is essentially a treatment of the physics aspects that come up in making an implosion weapon. I read a lot of undergraduate papers for a living and it's a good undergraduate paper, but that's what it is, in the end.
Why'd he do it? Because the Los Alamos weapons designer Ted Taylor essentially dared him to in McPhee's book. Taylor's message in the late 1960s/early 1970s was that there weren't any more secrets left, and that anyone half-competent could piece together how nuclear weapons were made from open sources. For this reason, Taylor thought that the only way to stop proliferation and nuclear terrorism was to have greater safeguards over the materials and facilities that make the fuel for the bombs. Phillips (the student) decided to see if he could prove that anyone could indeed do it, and as a not-great physics student he thought he'd be an ideal test case of that. He was pleased with the result but made no effort to publicize it; that came from others in the class. He eventually wrote a book on it (Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid) that is a fun read. He was not actually the first "student bomb designer" (there was one at MIT before him), nor the last (one from Harvard also did the same trick a year or so later). The 1970s were a weird time, man.
hoboforlife on August 4th, 2020 at 23:18 UTC »
So all these other countries were willing to pay him money for his design. What did the US offer him?
The_God_of_Abraham on August 4th, 2020 at 22:39 UTC »
The Libyans would also have been interested but they already had a deal with Doc Brown.