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BASEMENT H-BOMB PRODUCTION (or have you stopped worrying and really come to love the bomb?) PART I MAKING YOUR BOMB ================ Making and owning an H-bomb is the kind of challenge real Americans seek. Who wants to be a passive victim of nuclear war when with a little effort you can be an active participant? Bomb shelters are for losers. Who wants to huddle together underground eating canned Spam? Winners want to push the button themselves. Making your own H-bomb is a big step in nuclear assertiveness training - it's called Taking Charge. We're sure you'll enjoy the risks and the heady thrill of playing nuclear chicken. INTRODUCTION When the feds clamped down on The Progressive magazine for attemptng to publish an article on the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb, it piqued our curiosity. Was it really true that atomic and hydrogen bomb technology was so simple you could build an H-bomb in your own kitchen? Seven Days decided to find out. Food editor Barbara Ehrenreich, investigative reporter Peter Biskind, Photographer Jane Melnick and nuclear scientist Michio Kaku were given three days to cook up a workable H-bomb. They did and we have decided to share their culinary secrets with you. Not that Seven Days supports nuclear terrorism. We don't. We would prefer to die slowly from familiar poisons like low-level radiation, microwaves, DDT, DBCP, aflatoxins, PBBs, PBCs, or food dyes, rather than unexpectedly, say as hostage to a Latvian nationalist brandishing a homemade bomb. In our view the real terrorists are the governments, American, Soviet, French, Chinese, and British, that are hoarding H-bombs for their own use, and worse still, those governments (U.S., French and German) that are eagerly peddling advanced nuclear technology to countries like South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina so that they can make their own bombs. When these bombs are used, and they will be, it will be the world's big-time nuclear peddlers, along with corporate suppliers like General Electric, Westinghouse, and Gulf Oil, that we can thank for it. Gagging The Progressive will do no more for national security than backyard bomb shelters because like it or not the news is out. The heart of the successful H-bomb is the successful A-bomb. Once you've got your A-bombs made, the rest is frosting on the cake. All you have to do is set them up so that when they detonate they'llstart off a hydrogen-fusion reaction. 1. GETTING THE INGREDIENTS Uranium is the basic ingredient of the A-bomb. When a uranium atom's nucleus splits apart it releases a tremendous amount of energy (for its size). And it emits neutrons which go on to split other nearby uranium nuclei, releasing more energy, in what is called a 'chain reaction'. (When atoms split matter is converted into energy according to Einstein's equation E=mc2. What better way to mark his centennial than with your own atomic fireworks?) There are two kinds (isotopes) of uranium: the rare U-235, used in bombs, and the more common, heavier, but useless U-238. Natural uranium contains less than 1 percent U-235 and in order to be usable in bombs it has to be 'enriched' to 90 percent U-235 and only 10 percent U-238. Plutonium-239 can also be used in bombs as a substitute for U-235. Ten pounds of U-235 (or slightly less plutonium) is all that is necessary for a bomb. Less than ten pounds won't give you a critical mass. So purifying or enriching naturally occuring uranium is likely to be your first big hurdle. It is infinitely easy to steal ready-to-use enriched uranium or plutonium than to enrich some yourself. And stealing uranium is not as hard as it sounds. There are at least three sources of enriched uranium or plutonium. Enriched uranium is manufactured at a gaseous diffusion plant in Portsmouth Ohio. From there it is shipped in 10 liter bottles by airplane and trucks to conversion plants that turn it into uranium oxide or uranium metal. Each 10 liter bottle contains 7 kilograms of U-235, and there are 20 bottles to a typical shipment. Conversion facilities exist at Hematite, Missouri, Apollo, Pennsylvania, and Erwin, Tennessee. The Kerr-McGee plant at Crescent Oklahoma, where Karen Silkwood worked, was a conversion plant that 'lost' 40 lbs of plutonium. Enriched uranium can be stolen from these plants or from fuel-fabricating plants like those in New Haven, San Diego, or Lynchburg, Virginia. (A former Kerr-McGee supervisor, James V. Smith, when asked at the Silkwood trial if there were any security precautions at the plant to prevent theft, testified that 'There were none of any kind, no guards, no fences, no nothing.') Plutonium can be obtained from places like United Nuclear in Pawling, New York, Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, Tennessee, General Elecric in Pleasanton, California, Westinghouse in Cheswick, Pennsylvania, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Leechburg, Pennsylvania, and plants in Hanford, Washington and Morris, Illinois. According to Rolling Stone magazine, the Isrealis were involved in the theft of plutonium from NUMEC. Finally, you can steal enriched uranium or plutonium while it's en-route from conversion plants to fuel-fabricating plants. It is usually transported (by air or truck) in the form of uranium oxide, a brownish powder resembling instant coffee, or as a metal, coming in small chunks called 'broken buttons.' Both forms are shipped in small cans stacked in 5-inch cylinders braced with welded struts in the center of ordinary 55 gallon steel drums. The drums weigh about 100 pounds and are clearly marked 'Fissible Material' or 'Danger, Plutonium.' A typical shipment might go from the enrichment plant at Portsmouth, Ohio to the conversion plant in Hematite Missouri then to Kansas City by truck where it would be flown to Los Angeles and then trucked down to the General Atomic plant in San Diego. The plans for the General Atomic plant are on file at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's reading room at 1717 H Street NW Washington. A Xerox machine is provided for the convenience of the public. If you can't get hold of any enriched uranium, you'll have to settle for commercial grade (20 percent U-235). This can be stolen from university reactors of a type called TRIGA Mark II, where security is even more casual than at commercial plants. If stealing uranium seems too tacky, you can buy it. Unenriched uranium is available at any chemical supply house for $23 a pound. Commercial grade (3 to 20 percent enriched) is available for $40 a pound from Gulf Atomic. You'll have to enrich it further yourself. Quite frankly this can be something of a pain in the ass. You'll need to start with a little more than 50 pounds of commercial-grade uranium (it's only 20 percent U-235 at best, and you need 10 pounds of U-235 so...). But with a little kitchen table chemistry you'll be able to convert the solid uranium oxide you've purchased into a liquid form. Once you've done that you'll be able to separate the U-235 you'll need from the U-238. First pour a few gallons of concentrated hydrofluoric acid into your uranium oxide, converting it to uranium tetrafluoride. (Safety note: Concentrated hydrofluoric acid is so corrosive that it will eat its way through glass, so store it only in plastic. Used 2-gallon plastic milk containers will do.) Now you have to convert your uranium tetrafluoride to uranium hexafluoride, the gaseous form of uranium which is convenient for separating out the isotope U-235 from U-238. To get the hexafluoride form, bubble fluorine gas into your container of uranium tetrafluoride. Fluorine is available in pressurized tanks from chemical-supply firms. Be careful how you use it though because fluorine is several times more deadly than chlorine, the classic World War I poison gas. Chemists reccomend that you carry out this step under a stove hood (the kind used to remove unpleasant cooking odors). If you've done you're chemistry right you should now have a generous supply of uranium hexafluoride ready for enriching. In the old horse-and-buggy days of A-bomb manufacture the enrichment was carried out by passing the uranium hexaflouride through hundreds of miles of pipes, tubes, and membranes, until the U-235 was eventually separated from the U-238. This gaseous-diffusion process, as it was called, is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Gaseous-diffusion plants cover hundreds of acres and cost in the neighborhood of $2-billion each. So forget it. There are easier and cheaper ways to enrich your uranium. 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 and 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.) Now it's time to convert your enriched uranium back to metal form. This is easily enough accomplished by spooning several ladlefuls of calcium (available in tablet form from your drugstore) into each bucket of uranium. The calcium will react with the uranium hexafloride to produce calcium fluoride, a colorless salt which can be easily be separated from your pure enriched uranium metal. A few precautions, uranium is not dangerously radioactive in the amounts you'll be handling. If you plan to make more than one bomb it might be wise to wear gloves and a lead apron, the kind you can buy in dental supply stores. Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances known. If inhaled a thousandth of a gram can cause massive fibrosis of the lungs, a painful way to go. Even a millionth of a gram in the lungs will cause cancer. If eaten plutonium is metabolized like calcium. It goes straight to the bones where it gives out alpha particles preventing bone marrow from manufacturing red blood cells. The best way to avoid inhaling plutonium is to hold your breath while handling it. If this is too difficult wear a mask. To avoid ingesting plutonium orally follow this simple rule: Never make an A-bomb on an empty stomach. If you find yourself dozing off while you're working or if you begin to glow in the dark, it might be wise to take a blood count. Prick your finger with a sterile pin, place a drop of blood on a microscope slide, cover it with a cover slip, and examine under a microscope. If you notice a strange lack of white blood cells,it might be time to consider the old bone marrow transplant. Now you will need to form your uranium metal into two hemispheres. For this you will need two stainless steel bowls (about 6 inches in diameter) and a hammer. Uranium metal is malleable, like gold, so you should have no trouble hammering it into the bowl to get a good fit. Take one of your two five-pound hunks of uranium and fit it into each of the two stainless steel bowls. These two bowls of U-235 are the 'subcritical masses' which together forcefully will provide thecritical mass that makes your A-bomb go. Keep them a respectful distance apart while working because you don't want them to 'go critical' and blow up on you...at least not yet. Now hollow out the body of an old vacuum cleaner and place your two hemispheri cal bowls inside, open ends facing each other, no less than seven inches apart, using masking tape to set them up in position. The reason for the steel bowls and the vacuum cleaner, in case your wondering, is that these help reflect the neutrons back into the uranium for a more efficient explosion. 'A loose neutron is a useless neutron', as the A-bomb pioneers used to say. As far as the A-bomb goes, you're almost done. The final problem is to figure out how to get the two U-235 hemispheres to smash into each other with sufficient force to set off a truly effective fission reaction. Almost any type of explosive can be used to drive them together. Gunpowder, for example, is easily made at home from potassium nitrate, sulpher, and carbon. Or you can get some blasting caps or TNT, buy them or steal them from a construction site. Best of all is C4 plastic explosive. You can mold it around your bowls and it's fairly safe to work with (but it might be wise to shape it around an extra salad bowl in another room and then fit it to your stainless steel bowls). Once the explosives are in place all you need to do is hook up a simple detonation device with a few batteries, a switch, and some wire. Remember though that it is essential that the two charges, one on each side of the casing, go off at once. Now put the whole thing in the casing of an old Hoover vacuum cleaner and your finished with this part of the process. The rest is easy. A word to the wise about wastes. After your A-bomb is completed, you'll have a pile of moderately fatal radioactive wastes like U-238. These are not dangerous, but you do have to get rid of them. You can flush leftovers down the toilet (don't worry about polluting the ocean, there is already so much radioactive waste there, a few more bucketfuls won't make waves), or if your the fastidious type, the kind who never leaves gum under their seat at the movies, you can seal the nasty stuff in coffee cans and bury it in the backyard, just like Uncle Sam does. If the neighbors' kids have a habit of trampling the lawn, tell them to play over by the waste. You'll soon find that they're spending most of their time in bed. Going first class: If you're like us, you're feeling the economic pinch, and you'll may want to make your bonmb as inexpensively as possible, consonant of course with reasonable yield. The recipe we've given is for a budget-pleasing A-bomb, no frills, no flourishes, just your basic 5 megaton bomb, capable of wiping out the New York metropolitan area, the Bay area, or Boston. But don't forget, your H-bomb will only be as good as the A-bombs in it. If you want to spend a little more money you can punch-up your A-bomb considerably. Instead of centrifuging your uranium by hand, you can buy a commercial centrifuge (Fisher Scientific sells one for about $1000). You also might want to be fussier about your design. The Hiroshima bomb, a relatively crude one, only fissioned 1 percent of it's uranium and yielded only 13 kilotons. In order to fission more of the uranium, the force of your explosive 'trigger' has got to be evenly diffused around the sphere, the same pressure has to be exerted on every point of the sphere simultaneously. (It was a technique for producing this sort of simultaneous detonation by fashioning the explosives into lenses that the government accused Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of trying to steal). 3. NOW, MAKE THREE MORE A-BOMBS FOLLOWING THE DIRECTIONS ABOVE PART II PUTTING YOUR H-BOMB TOGETHER ============================ The heart of the H-bomb is the fusion process. Several A-bombs are detonated in such a way as to create the extremely high temperature (100 million degrees celcius) necessary to fuse lithium deuteride (LiD) into helium. When the lithium nucleus slams into the deuterium nucleus, two helium nuclei are created, and if this happens to enough deuterium nuclei rapidly enough, the result is an enormous amount of energy, the energy of the H-bomb. And you don't have to worry about stealing lithium deuteride, it can be purchased from any chemical-supply house. It costs $1000 a pound. If your budget won't allow it you can substitute lithium hydride at $40 a pound. You will need at least 100 pounds, It's a corrosive and toxic powder so be careful. Place the lithium deuteride or hydride in glass jars and surround it with four A-bombs in their casings. Attach one to the same detonator so that they will go off simultaneously. The container for the whole thing is no problem. They can be placed anywhere (inside an old stereo console, a discarded refrigerator, etc.). When the detonator sets off the four A-bombs all eight hemispheres of fissionable material will slam into each other at the same time creating four critical masses and four detonations. This will raise the temperature of the lithium deuteride to 100 million degrees C fast enough (a few billionths of a second) so that the lithium will not be blown all over the neighborhood before the nuclei have time to fuse. The result, at least 1000 times the punch of the puny A-bomb that leveled Hiroshima (20 million tons of TNT vs. 20 thousand tons.) PART III WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR BOMB ========================= Now that you have a fully assembled H-bomb housed in an attractive console of your choice you may be wondering: What should I do with it? Every family will have to answer this question according to its own tastes and preferences but you may want to explore some possibilities which have been successfully pioneered by the American government. 1. SELL YOUR BOMB AND MAKE A PILE OF MONEY In these days of rising inflation, rising unemployment, and an uncertain economic outlook, few businesses make as much sense as weapons production. If your career forcast is cloudy, bomb sales may be the only sure way to avoid the humiliation of receiving welefare or unemployment. At any income level a home H-bomb business can be an invaluable income supplement, and certainly a profitable alternative to selling Tupperware or pirated Girl Scout cookies. Unfortunately for the family bomb business, big government has already cornered a large part of the world market. But this does not mean that there is a shortage of potential customers. The raid on Entebee was the Waterloo of hijacking, and many nationalist groups are now on the alert for new means to get their message across. They'd jump at the chance to get hold of an H-bomb. Emerging nations that can't ante up enough rice or sugar to buy themselves a reactor from G.E. or Westinghouse are also shopping around. You may wonder about the ethics of selling to nations or groups whose goal you disapprove of. But here again take a tip from our government, forget ideology, it's cash that counts. And remember, H-bomb sales have a way of escalating, almost like a chain reaction. Suppose you make a sale to South Yemen which you believe to be a Soviet puppet. Well within a few days some discrete inquiries from North Yemen and possibly the Saudis, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians as well can be expected. Similarly, a sale to the IRA will generate a sale to the Ulster government, a sale to the Tanzanians will bring the Ugandans running and so forth. It doesn't matter which side your on, only how many sides there are. Don't forget about the possibility of repeat sales to the same customer. As the experience of the U.S and the U.S.S.R. has shown, each individual nation has a potentially infinite need for H-bombs. No customer, no matter how small, can ever have too many. 2. USE YOUR BOMB AT HOME Many families are attracted to the H-bomb simply as a 'deterrent'. A discrete sticker on the door or on the living room window saying 'This Home Protected by H-bomb' will discourage IRS investigators, census takers, and Jehovah's Witnesses. You'll be suprised how fast the crime rate will go down and property values will go up. And once the news gets out that you are a home H-bomb owner you'll find that you have unexpected leverage in neighborhood disputes over everything from parking places and stereo noise levels to school tax rates. So relax and enjoy the pride and excitement of home H-bombownership! IS IT FOR YOU? Let's be honest. The H-bomb isn't for everyone. Frankly there are people who can't handle it. They break out in hives at the very mention of mega-deaths, fallout, radiation sickness. The following quiz will help you find out whether you have what it takes for home H-bomb ownership. If you can answer 'yes' to six or more of these questions, then your emotionally eligible to join the nuclear club. If not, a more conventional weapon may be more your cup of tea, try botulism-toxin, laser rays, or nerve gas. 1. I ignore the demands of others. 2. I subscribe to one or more of the following: Soldier of Fortune, Hustler, Popular Mechanics, Self. 3. Though I have many interesting acquaintances, I am my own best friend. 4. I know what to say after you say 'Hello', but I am seldom interested in pursuing the conversation. 5. I have seen the movie 'The Deer Hunter' more than once. 6. I know that everone can be a winner if they want to, and I resent whiners. 7. I own one or more of the following: handgun, video game, trash compactor, snowmobile. 8. I am convinced that leukemia is psychosomatic. 9. I am aware that most vegetarians are sexually impotent. 10. I have read evidence that solar energy is a Communist conspiracy. MYTHS ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR Ever since the first mushroom cloud over Hiroshima ushered in the atomic age a small group of nay-sayers and doom-mongers has lobbied, campaigned and demonstrated to convince Americans that H-bomb ownership, along with nuclear power is dangerous and unhealthy. Using their virtual stranglehold over the media these people have tried to discredit everything nuclear from energy to war. They have vastly overrated the risks of nuclear bombs and left many americans feeling demoralized and indecisive, not sure where the truth lies. Well, here are the myths, and here are the facts. Myth: After a nuclear exchange the earth will no longer be suitable for human habitation. Fact: This is completely false. According to one scientist (quoted in John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy)' The largest bomb that has ever been exploded anywhere was 60 megatons, and that is one-thousandth the force of an earthquake, one-thousandth the force of a hurricane. We have lived with earthquakes and hurricanes for a long time.' Another scientist adds, 'It is often assumed that a full blown nuclear war would be the end of life on earth. That is far from the truth. To end life on earth would take at least a thousand times the total yield of all the nuclear explosives existing in the world, and probably a lotmore.' Even if humans succumbed, many forms of life would survive a nuclear free-for-all, cockroaches, certain forms of bacteria, &lichens. Myth: Radiation is bad for you. Fact: Everything is bad for you if you have too much of it. If you eat too many bananas you'll get a stomach-ache. If you get too much sun you can get sunburned (or even skin cancer). Same thing with radiation. Too much may make you feel under the weather, but nuclear industry officials insist that there is no evidence that low-level radiation has any really serious adverse effects. And, high-level radiation may bring unexpected benefits. It speeds up evolution by weeding out unwanted genetic types and creating new ones. (Remember the old saying, 'Two heads are better than one.') Nearer home it's plain that radiation will get rid of pesky crab grass and weeds, and teenagers will find that brief exposure to a nuclear burst vaporizes acne and other skin blemishes. (Many survivors of the Hiroshima bomb found that they were free from skin and it's attendant problems forever.)