Port 80

This morning, a piece has been making the rounds of the blogosphere claiming that a member on a terrorist forum has posted instructions for how to make a hydrogen bomb. This naturally piqued my interest, so I followed Michelle Malkin’s link to Internet Haganah, who linked to the actual forum post.

Five minutes later, I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

This forum post is priceless. It is one of the best pieces of scientific satire I have ever seen. I can only hope and pray that terrorist groups attempt to construct an atomic bomb using these instructions - if they survive the attempt, they’ll have at least wasted months of effort.

Perhaps the high point of this instructions is the author’s advice on enrichment of uranium hexaflouride:

First transform the gas into a liquid by subjecting it to pressure. You can use a bicycle pump for this. Then make a simple home centrifuge. Fill a standard-size bucket one-quarter full of liquid uranium hexafluoride. Attach a six-foot rope to the bucket handle. Now swing the rope (and attached bucket) around your head as fast as possible. Keep this up for about 45 minutes. Slow down gradually, and very gently put the bucket on the floor. The U-235, which is lighter, will have risen to the top, where it can be skimmed off like cream. Repeat this step until you have the required 10 pounds of uranium. (Safety note: Don’t put all your enriched uranium hexafluoride in one bucket. Use at least two or three buckets and keep them in separate corners of the room. This will prevent the premature build-up of a critical mass.)

There are two primary problems with these instructions:

1. The difference in mass between an molecule of uranium hexaflouride with U-235 and a molecule of uranium hexaflouride with U-238 is precisely 3 neutrons. Since these substances are chemically identical, they will tend to mix with currents in the bucket, and not separate “like cream.” Thus, the force exerted by a spinning bucket will not even begin to produce enriched U-235. Real centrifuge enrichment processes use thousands of extremely high speed centrifuges, one feeding the next, to create highly enriched uranium.
2. At room temperature and pressure, uranium hexaflouride is a solid.

The instructions also feature these gems, which are but a meager sample of the hilarities in this post:

• Michio Kaku, the noted string theorist, is a nuclear physicist.
• Edward Teller will be interested to know that, once you have an A-bomb, building an H-bomb is merely “frosting on the cake.”
• The difference between a gun-barrel and implosion bomb is not worth mentioning in the article.

The article then finishes up with a quiz on whether you, the reader, are “emotionally eligible to join the H-bomb club.”

Clearly, this article was written as a satire piece. But where did it come from? A little Googling on key phrases (try “casing of an old Hoover”) reveals that this set of “instructions” has been around for a long time - the oldest online appearance I can find is a 1994 posting to the USENET group rec.humor.funny. The introduction to that posting, along with the text of the article, suggest that these instructions were copied from the alternative national magazine Seven Days. Unfortunately, I can’t provide a link to Seven Days, as it was folded into The Nation in 1980. These “instructions” have been in circulation for at least 25 years.

The fact that this article is a satirical piece is not an indication that we don’t need to worry about nuclear terrorism. (Although we probably don’t need to worry about nuclear terrorism from the members of that particular forum.) It is a reminder that we ought to take “instructions” of this nature with a very large grain of salt. Building nuclear weapons is, to use an engineering euphemism, “non-trivial.” In the 1940s, it took the top physicists in the world years and a crash government program to pull it off. Today, atomic weapons are within the reach of most nations which can supply sufficient funding. However, we still have a long way to go before uranium enrichment becomes an afternoon kitchen chemistry project.

Today, we’re going to learn how to make plutonium from common household items. — Philo on Secrets of the Universe, UHF

Update: Welcome, Michelle Malkin readers! If you’re curious as to what else I’ve written, this post has a few good starting points.