The US government has just declassified Cold War-era documents about DIY nuclear weapons

The National Security Archive recently released declassified documents related to “Project Nth Nation,” a Cold War-era experiment involving a DIY nuclear weapons project. Fearing the potential proliferation of nuclear weapons, nuclear scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory hired three young physicists to see if they could design and test their own nuclear weapon.

Documents include a Long report Written by the team that designed the DIY nuclear bomb, it is two pages long Briefing noteA long, heavily edited report on A Secret briefing tour The team presented it after completing the experiment. The latest document is new and details a presentation the scientists did about their experiment, in which they toured the country and gave interviews about how they developed an open-source nuclear weapon.

The new document is titled “Post-Experiment Activities in the Ninth State Experiment” and includes many of the fun touches of a document about three freshly graduated physics students who designed a nuclear bomb. There’s a cartoon depicting college students whose protests are supported by the power of the atomic bomb, and a bizarre drawing of a man building a nuclear bomb while a black cat arches nearby.

“The details of the presentation are very interesting, namely the slides and the little drawings. It seems a bit silly to have it almost completely redacted as it is, since the whole point of the Ninth State experiment is to point out that this kind of tight secrecy is not what might prevent Even a country with no more information. Three physicists have managed to design a weapon… based on knowledge that was publicly available 60 years ago, and with access to “supercomputers” that any modern desktop would put to shame. But the rules It’s the rules, I guess. Alex WellersteinA professor at Stevens Institute of Technology and an expert on the history of nuclear secrecy told Gizmodo.

The moment Robert Oppenheimer successfully tested the world’s first nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, America began to worry about nuclear weapons falling into the “wrong hands.” Russia tested its first nuclear bomb just four years later. The United Kingdom obtained the atomic bomb in 1952, France followed suit in 1960, and nuclear experts in Washington began to worry that every country in the world would soon have a nuclear weapon.

Nuclear science was a closely guarded and well-kept secret. Detonating the first atomic bomb took an incredible amount of time, resources, and secrecy. Development in each subsequent state was a little easier. American experts wonder how difficult it is for a country’s scientists to build one of these weapons that will lead to the end of the world based on readily available information.

They called it the “N-state problem,” and to solve it they designed the “N-state experiment.”

“Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory began its country experiment in May 1964, to see whether a few capable physicists, who had no knowledge of nuclear weapons and had access only to unclassified technology, could produce a reliable weapon design,” a declassified document states. Confidential and published by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Read NSA. The plan was for the experiment to end after a year, but they gave them three.

“Three young, part-time PhD physicists successfully achieved a practical nuclear weapons design in a period of approximately three years,” the documents said. The conclusion, then, was that a dedicated group of scientists working for a foreign government with the appropriate resources and knowledge could build a nuclear weapon.

This turned out to be true. During the test, China detonated its first nuclear weapon. India and Pakistan followed a decade later. Israel, whose nuclear weapons program is shrouded in secrecy, likely obtained its nuclear weapon by the time the ninth country test concluded. Both South Africa and Libya had nuclear weapons programs that were nearing completion before they were abandoned for political reasons.

The documents indicated that it was remarkable what three specialist physicists with the time and knowledge could achieve. “The people at Los Alamos had the advantages of manpower, experience (including the presence of some of the world’s leading physicists) and the stimulating climate in which they worked,” the documents said. “We had the advantage of knowing that a bomb could be made and having access to a large amount of literature on shock waves, explosives, nuclear physics and reactor technology published since 1945.”

Wellerstein was happy to read the documents, but wondered why so much of the new document remained classified. “The value of declassifying this information is not just sheer fascination, but it will help understand what aspects of this experiment are true ‘replications’ or not,” he said.

“Did they take a different path of thinking about bomb design than the actual bomb designers at Los Alamos would have done at the time? That’s more interesting to me than the end results (of the bomb design),” Wellerstein said. “How many paths are there to the same results? To what extent does the “open source” approach privilege one path or another? That kind of thing is missing due to revisions, unfortunately. This, again, seems somewhat silly given the primary purpose of the exercise.