How three students designed an atomic bomb

A top-secret project from the 1960s tasked a team of post-doctoral physics students with designing “The Bomb”.

By the spring of 1964, four countries had developed nuclear weapons—the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France—and China was about to become the fifth.

With fears of nuclear proliferation growing in Washington, Pentagon officials had a question: If the United States had been the first country to obtain nuclear weapons, who would be the last — the umpteenth country?

To answer this question, the Pentagon launched a top-secret project, the “” (the “Experience of the Nth Country“), no Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, em Livermore, na Califórnia.

According to declassified but heavily redacted statements, the objective was “to see if some competent physicists, with no familiarity with nuclear weapons and only access to unclassified technology, could produce a credible design of a weapon” that would give “a small nation a significant effect on its external relations”.

In other words: could a developing country produce a nuclear weapon?

According to , the laboratory brought together an unlikely group of three post-doctoral physicists, chosen not for their knowledge of nuclear physics, but precisely for their ignorance on the subject.

Although they didn’t know the inner workings of a nuclear weapon—one of the country’s best-kept secrets—they were tasked with designing one from scratch.

If they wanted to carry out tests, they had to describe them in writing, in detail, and submit them, through an intermediary, to anonymous bomb designers, who would calculate the results and return them.

The team had an advantage over scientists at Manhattan Project who created the first atomic bomb: I knew it was possible. Or, like a three of the physicists, Dave Dobsonhe would later say in an interview, “the big advantage we had over Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and those guys was that we knew it could work.”

They started by going to the university library, reading everything they could find about explosives and nuclear physics. Ironically, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ““ program, created to spread non-military nuclear energy to other countries, provided an enormous amount of information.

After all, they reasoned, a fission reactor was nothing more than a nuclear bomb operating in slow motion.

In 1967, after three years of part-time work, countless tests, some controlled explosions, and hours of computer modeling with punched cards, they sent off the final drawing and waited to hear back.

The silence was total.

Instead of responding, the Pentagon had them present their work at various federal agencies and research institutions, including Los Alamos National Laboratory—where they presented their work to official officials, in the style of a television news report, and answered carefully formulated questions from silent audiences.

After the last presentation, in Livermore, they were finally informed by a weapons designer that, “if it had been built, it would have caused a very impressive explosion, on the same order of magnitude as the Hiroshima bomb”.

The “Nth Country Experiment” ended with the three physicists demonstrating that any country with access to a library, electronics, and the ability to work metal with precision could design a nuclear weapon.

Although the team’s bibliography remains classified, the physicists showed that the limiting factor was not scientific knowledge. It was, rather, access to suitable fissile material, such as plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

It is a stunning demonstration of the power of applied scientific research, as well as a stark warning about the ease of nuclear proliferation.

Even so, since the Nth Country Project, only five more countries have obtained atomic weapons — China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea — bringing the total number of nuclear powers to nine, including Israel, which has never officially confirmed that it possesses this arsenal.

It remains to be seen whether the tenth country will be the nth country.