Let’s say I’m a recently retired billionaire, with lots of money to burn. I decide that I want to own my own working nuclear bomb, simply to hang in my foyer and brag about at the country club.
So, I hire some grad students from MIT, Caltech and Stanford, along with some experienced ex-government employees, give them a near-unlimited budget, and tell them “build me a hydrogen bomb!” Let’s assume that the budget includes enough money to get all the needed materials from legal channels - meaning they won’t need to steal plutonium from a government lab.
I’m almost 100% sure that there is something illegal about this, even if I have absolutely no intent to ever use the bomb (or even threaten to). But I don’t know specifically what about it is illegal.
So, can anyone point me to the exact law that makes it illegal for a private citizen to own a nuclear bomb, or any other weapon of mass destruction?
And please don’t answer with a clever nitpick, like “The government controls every known source of <some obscure material>, so you’d have to steal it, so it would be illegal because of simple theft! HA!”. That’s not what I’m asking.
Is it just me being silly or did Michael Moore ask a friend of one of the Oklahoma bombers if he felt it wasn’t ok to own a nuclear device on Bowling for Columbine.
It would be illegal for a number of reasons. I’m fairly certain that the radioactive materials would be illegal to posses. Just the conventional portion of the bomb would be an unregistered destructive device which would put you in dutch with the ATFE.
(2) with intent to deprive another of nuclear material or nuclear byproduct material, knowingly -
(A)takes and carries away nuclear material or nuclear byproduct material of another without authority;...
(b) The punishment for an offense …
(B) imprisonment -
(i) for any term of years or for life
Seeing as how I doubt one could get Uncle Sam to give permission to possess plutonium lawfully, if you try to get it unlawfully you could end up in the clink for the rest of your life.
There were two events in the 70s that almost cover this. In one case, a college student built a nuclear bomb. The feds took it away from him. The other was some reporters who worked out how to build a bomb and were going to publish. The government stopped that. In neither case was plutonium involved. I don’t believe any charges were filed, but the lack of plutonium might have had something to do with that.
And the moral of this story is that you don’t need to be a billionaire and you don’t need a team of physics students from multiple schools. You may need to get in touch with some Libyan terrorists for the plutonium, though.
It really probably is just a matter of getting the proper permits. Without the permits, it’s illegal. With the permits, it’s legal. You just wouldn’t be able to get the permits.
What would be interesting is if your cadre of university students came up with a nuclear device that didn’t require anything terribly exotic and tightly regulated.
I think that, by definition, a nuclear device is going to require some fissionable material, which automatically puts you in the “exotic and tightly regulated” sphere. Just picture sauntering into Home Depot and accosting an orange-shirt: “In which aisle is the enriched uranium?”
Well, it’s not quite accurate. Read about it here and here. A student, by putting together information from various unclassified sources, put together a design for a nuclear device that was good enough to prompt the feds to put a lid on it.
The retired billionaire playboy asked for a hydrogen bomb. Fusion, not fission.
Granted many fusion bombs use a conventional fission explosion as the source for the neutron flux required to cause the chain reaction in the lithium deuteride, but there’s nothing saying our intrepid team of bright young folks couldn’t find some other source of sufficient neutron flux… or use some other way of concentrating the deuterium, reducing the flux requirements.
Palladium, bailing wire, a couple of car batteries, and some seawater… you’re all set. :dubious:
Well, there are a heck of a lot of Navy nuke students training at the Navy Nuclear Prototype Site there. Trust me, the feds know all about Ballston Spa, and 1010011010 too, for that matter. He’s a current nuke student there. (I trained there back in 1992.)
As I remember, it’s generally illegal to build or possess a “destructive device.” I think the law was written broadly enough that it would still apply to, for example, some kind of Antimatter-Bomb, which wouldn’t even have to use any explosives or nuclear material.
