Have you ever written an academic paper so shocking that it gets confiscated by the FBI ? No ? Well , extolment , you have one Princeton student measure .
John Aristotle Phillips was a 21 - class - sure-enough undergraduate pupil in aerospace and mechanically skillful science , described as " underperform " when he took on a projection that would end upearning him the nickname"The A - Bomb Kid " .
Using unclassified textile from the US Government Printing Office and noesis gained from his school subroutine library , he drew up designs for a work nuclear bomb that could , fit in toreports at the time , level a quarter of Manhattan .
In 1976 , he work on the beach ball - sized equipment for several month , want toshow how wanton it would be for terroristsor other bad thespian to create a nuclear bomb using publicly available knowledge . In that respect , he succeeded , given that nuclear scientist Dr Frank Chilton said that the design was " pretty much guaranteed to make " .
Other undergraduates had attempted similar labor before , but skin with the initial conventional explosive that triggers the implosion wave towards the nub of the bomb . This cognition he obtained by simplyphoning DuPont , and asking them politely what they used , thoughhe claimedthat it could be triggered with other explosive such as TNT .
His bomb – which he made a non - working mockup of in his room – theoretically would have cultivate , and would have been about a third as brawny as the bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II .
Though anyone wishing to in reality make a bomb calorimeter would demand to jump through a circumstances more hoops ( commence clutches of atomic number 92 / plutonium and then enriching it is not a matter of waiting for an Amazon Prime saving ) , his paper gain him a visit from the FBI and CIA , as well as an A grade .
A few hebdomad after handing in his newspaper , he returned to appear for it in the physics section and establish that it was n’t there . It was only then , and after he was quiz by the section chair , that he understand that the information he gained from DuPont was possibly classified .
