How to Get a Nuclear Bomb

Dear kannu

A very good article on how to get a nuclear bomb. There have been fictional accounts of how people made a nuclear bomb in their backyard but its not even that difficult. Just get some plutonium, grind it up and sprinkle the stuff out of the car while you are travelling in New York or London. And viola, one has achieved what the terrorists want, terror and hitting the enemy (us) when and where we don't expect it. 

So what do you do when the situation is too complex? Or too big? It could be a huge company or a huge project or huge macroeconomic situation. Keep a handle on the detail son, size shouldn't make a difference to keeping an eye on the detail. 

Second, keep things simple. As much as possible. More complexity means more dimensions and it will cause issues managing and fixing the inevitable problems. So reduce the complexity down. 

Third, always keep an eye out on the stupidity factor. There's always that stupidity angle. In my experience there is always some kind of stupidity involved. 

Finally, always use problems. As the man said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. While people may be running around thinking the sky is falling down, stay cool. Use the problem to solve something else, short something etc etc.  

love

Baba

How to Get a Nuclear Bomb [longform.org]
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2006/12/how-to-get-a-nuclear-bomb/5402/

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Hiroshima was destroyed in a flash by a bomb dropped from a propeller-driven B-29 of the U.S. Army Air Force, on the warm morning of Monday, August 6, 1945. The bomb was not chemical, as bombs until then had been, but rather atomic, designed to release the energies Einstein described. It was a simple cannon-type device of the sort that today any number of people could build in a garage. It fell nose-down for forty-three seconds, and for maximum effect never hit the ground. One thousand nine hundred feet above the city the bomb fired a lump of highly enriched uranium down a steel tube into a receiving lump of the same refined material, creating a combined uranium mass of 133 pounds. In relation to its surface area, that mass was more than enough to achieve “criticality” and allow for an uncontrollable chain of fission reactions, during which neutrons collided with uranium nuclei, releasing further neutrons in a blossoming process of self-destruction. The reactions could be sustained for just a millisecond, and they fully exploited less than two pounds of the uranium before the resulting heat forced a halt to the process through expansion. Uranium is the heaviest element on earth, almost twice as heavy as lead, and two pounds of it amounts to only about three tablespoonfuls. Nonetheless, the explosion over Hiroshima yielded a force equivalent to 15,000 tons (fifteen kilotons) of TNT, achieved temperatures higher than the sun’s, and emitted light-speed pulses of dangerous radiation. More than 150,000 people died.