The US government just declassified Cold War-era documents about sam nuts

The National Security Archive released newly declassified documents related to Project NTH Country, a Cold War-era experiment involving a DIY nuclear weapons project. Concerned about the possible 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.

The documents include a A long report Written by the team that designed DIY Nuke, in two pages Briefing memorandumand a long and heavily edited report on a Classified briefing tour The team gave after they completed the experiment. The latest document is new and details the road show the scientists did for their experiment, in which they toured the country and gave interviews about how they developed an open-source nuclear weapon.

The new paper is titled “The Activities of the NTH Country Experiment Followers” and includes very light touches for a paper about three recent physics graduate students who designed nuts. There’s a cartoon depicting college students whose protests are bolstered by the power of the atomic bomb, and a strange drawing of a man constructing a nuke while a black cat twists it back nearby.

“The details of their presentation are quite amusing – well, the little slides and drawings. It feels pretty silly to be as nearly completely redacted as it is, given that the whole point of the NTY Country experiment is to point out that this kind of heavy-handed secrecy is no more than three PhD students in weapon design. .. and this was based on what knowledge was publicly available 60 years ago and with access to “supercomputers” that would put any modern desktop machine to shame. But rules are rules, I guess, “” Alex Wellsteinprofessor at the 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 Nuk just four years later. The UK got the bomb in 1952, followed by France in 1960, and the nuclear Weedens in DC were starting to worry that every country in the world would soon have a nuclear weapon.

Nuclear science was a closely guarded and well-kept secret. The detonation of the first atomic bomb took an incredible amount of time, resources and secrecy. The development of each subsequent country was a little easier. How difficult would it be, American experts wondered, for the country’s scientists to build one of these world-class weapons based on readily available information?

They called it “the country problem” and to solve it they designed the “country country experiment”

“(Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) launched its experiment in NTH country in May 1964 to see if a few capable physicists unfamiliar with nuclear weapons and with access only to unclassified technology could produce a reliable weapon design.” , a declassified document released by The NSA reads. The plan was for the experiment to end after a year, but they gave them three.

“Three young part-time PhD students were able to achieve a working nuclear weapons design over a period of about three years,” the documents said. The conclusion then was that a special group of scientists working for a foreign government with the right resources and knowledge set could build a nuclear weapon.

That turned out to be correct. During the experiment, China detonated its first nuclear weapon. India and Pakistan followed a decade later. Israel, whose nuclear weapons program is shrouded in secrecy, probably got its nuclear weapon around the time the NTH Country experiment ended. South Africa and Libya had nuclear weapons programs that were close to completion before they abandoned them for political reasons.

The papers note that it is remarkable what three dedicated physicists can achieve with time and knowledge. “The people at Los Alamos had the advantages of manpower and experience (including the presence of some of the world’s outstanding physicists) and the motivational climate in which they worked,” the documents said. “We had the advantages of knowing that a bomb could be built and having access to a large body of literature on shock waves, explosives, nuclear physics and reactor technology published since 1945.”

Wellerstein enjoyed reading the documents, but wondered why so much of the new one was still classified. “The value of declassifying that information is not just fascination, but would help to understand what aspects of this experiment are a true ‘replication’ or not,” he said.

“They took 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’ (bomb designs),” Wellstein said. “How many paths are there to the same results? How much does the “open source” privilege go one way or the other? This kind of thing is missing because of the edits, unfortunately. Which again feels pretty silly given the whole point of the exercise.