The A-Bomb Kid

Village Voice: My fascinated dread began in 1978, when I was nine. Leafing through a waiting room copy of Book Digest, I came across the following proposition: "Suppose an average—or below-average in my case—physics student at a university could design a working atomic bomb on paper."

The premise was not fanciful. The author had done it. In 1977, John Aristotle Phillips found worldwide fame as the Princeton junior who designed a working Nagasaki-class weapon the size of a beach ball. In fact, after calling DuPont and asking for a good detonator for imploding, ahem, a dense sphere of metal—"God, how obvious," he scoffed to himself. "Why don't you just say you want to implode Pu-239?"—he actually improved on the original model.

Phillips was no Lex Luthor. He was the mascot who ran around in the Tiger outfit at Princeton games, a duty he acquired after being fired as cowbell player in the marching band. His academic prospects were none too bright. "If I flunk another course," he admitted, "I'll be bounced out of the Big U right on my ass."

So Phillips proposed a Term Paper to End All Term Papers: "How to Build Your Own Atomic Bomb." His instructor was Freeman Dyson, famed colleague of bomb-meisters Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. But Dyson carefully avoided giving his student extra help. Phillips gathered declassified documents at the National Technical Information Service—"Oh, you want to build a bomb too?" a librarian asked him dryly—and many sleepless nights of calculations later, he pulled it off. Phillips did this while camped out with a broken typewriter in the campus Ivy Club. For extra surrealism, the club members who observed his mysterious work included fellow student Parker Stevenson. Yes, the Hardy Boys' star Parker Stevenson.

So how good was his design?

"I remember telling him I would give him an A for it," Dyson e-mails me, "but advised him to burn it as soon as the grade was registered." Phillips was spared the trouble of procuring matches: The U.S. government kept his term paper and classified it. Soon Phillips was pursued by hack journalists and trench-coaters alike: The Pakistani embassy tried to get a copy; agents trailed him; the FBI and CIA got involved. Everything exploded. (read the whole thing)