Most academics have probably never written an academic article shocking enough to be confiscated by the FBI. But one Princeton student had accomplished it in the 1970s.
John Aristotle Phillips, a 21-year-old undergraduate in aeronautical and mechanical sciences, was described as a “underachiever” when he undertook a project that earned him the nickname “The A-Bomb Kid”.
Using non-confidential materials from the U.S. Government Printing Office and information he had obtained from the school library, he devised a working nuclear bomb that, according to reports at the time, could raze a quarter of Manhattan.
In 1976, he spent several months working on a beach ball-sized bomb to show how easy it would be for terrorists or other bad actors to develop a nuclear bomb using public information. At this point, nuclear scientist Dr. Given that Frank Chilton says the design is “almost guaranteed to work,” we’d say it’s a success.
Other undergraduates had attempted similar projects before, but were having trouble with the first conventional explosive that triggered the blast wave toward the center of the bomb. Phillips got this information by calling the explosives manufacturer DuPont and politely asking what they were using, but he said it could be triggered by other explosives like TNT.
His bomb, which he built as a non-working model in his room, would theoretically work and would be about one-third as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the United States at the end of World War II.
Although someone who really wanted to make a bomb would have to go through a lot more (after all, seizing uranium/plutonium and then enriching it isn’t as easy as waiting for a cargo delivery), his article earned him an A grade as well as a visit from the FBI and CIA. .
A few weeks after handing in his paper, he went back to the physics department to look at it and found it wasn’t there. After being questioned by the department head at the time, he realized that the information he had received from DuPont was probably confidential.
The FBI later visited the university and confiscated his article and the mock-up he had made in his room. After her work on the device, Phillips became a nonproliferation activist, even running for Congress several times on the platform.
The intervening years have made John Aristotle Phillips an entrepreneur. But the world still remembers him as The A-Bomb Kid, who tried to build a nuclear bomb at the university and almost succeeded…
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