Shays claims "Home Depot" nuke possible. Really?

[Tuckerfan]

@ambushed

But you need such inordinate precision in your machine tools and other production and engineering equipment that I cannot accept that you could buy the necessary materials, including such things as the exotic metals you’d need, from Home Depot (assuming, of course, that one possessed all the skills necessary).

Precision with machine tools is simply a matter of patience. With a few simple hand tools (and lots of time) a talented machinist can polish something to an accuracy of millionths of an inch. Presently, I’m running machines which were built from 1927 - 1975 and we make parts for military equipment and aircraft (which have some of the most stringent tolerances around). You’d have to mine the ore, as I mentioned earlier (and Home Depot does sell shovels and pick axes).

As you know, even with billions of 1940’s dollars, the Manhattan scientists and engineers faced nearly insurmountable difficulties. To do what you suggest is essentially equivalent to building an entire high-tech, industrialized civilization from scratch using nothing but what you could buy from Home Depot.

Not exactly. The hardest thing is to create something for the first time, after that, well, anybody can make a knockoff.

But I do understand that you’re deliberately stretching hypotheses to extremes pretty much as an exercise rather than arguing that it’s genuinely possible in the real world to make a nuke from Home Depot parts.

Right, you could do it, but heck, why not go next door to Harbor Freight and buy your own machine shop?

@Jinx

One must understand what is meant by a dirty bomb vs. a “nuke”. A dirty bomb is a device that can pepper an area (doesn’t have to be a huge area) with nasty stuff, often using radiological materials.

Which is why I mentioned knowing where there was some ore, and not about using the material from smoke detectors to create the bomb. Any homebuilt fission bomb would be much dirtier than one produced by a professional labratory.

[commasense]

The congressman was almost certainly suggesting that one could get everything you needed except the fissile material at a hardware store. If your store carries explosives, that is probably roughly true. As others have said, for a gun-type bomb, pretty much all you need is some pipe, some explosives, and a few Kg of U-235. (Sorry, but you can’t use PU in a gun-type weapon.) You don’t need to do much in the way of fancy electronics or precision machining. Aside from the core, the hardest parts to get would probably be the neutron source for the initiator. Off the top of my head, I don’t know how easy it is to obtain such materials.

If you’ve ever seen The Fourth Protocol with Pierce Brosnan, I recommend it. It is a taut thriller about a KGB agent who smuggles the components of a gun-type bomb into England and sets it up next to an air force base. I believe that the depiction of the weapon in the film is fairly accurate. About six feet tall and made of pipe and machined parts mounted on a frame made of angle iron. Except for the core and initiator, nothing particularly exotic.

The design of Little Man, the first gun-type bomb, was so simple, and the scientists’ confidence in its working so high, that they didn’t test it before dropping it on Hiroshima. Probably the only time a weapon has been used in war without being tested first.

An implosion weapon would be much harder, if not impossible, to make from hardware store parts. They require complicated electronics and precision machining, as well as precise arrangment of the shaped charges. But, as Tuckerfan said, now that it’s been done, doing it again would not require anything like the level of effort that the first one took.

Also, a very large part of the industrial effort required for the Manhattan Project was for the production and refinement of the U-235 and PU-239. And this is where I disagree with Tuckerfan. Even granting that he used the expression “in theory,” there is simply no way that any entity much smaller than a national government could marshall the resources needed to mine, refine, and purify fissile material. It is way too complex, expensive, and dangerous a process to be done by a few well funded amateurs.

So there is a germ of truth in Shays’ claim, but since he didn’t bother to clarify that you can’t get the fissile material at Home Depot, the overall effect of his statement was misleading, IMHO.

[Lemur866]

OK, obviously we need to exclude the uranium or plutonium. You can’t get that at Home Depot. So we pay a disaffected Russian physicist a truckful of cabbages to look the other way while we walk off with the fissionables.

Now, once you’ve got the fissionables, it may be hyperbole to say you can buy everything else you need at Home Depot, but it is true that all the other parts can be purchased pretty much openly. It might not be the best idea to set up your machine shop using only equipment purchased at Home Depot, but you can surely buy everything you need with cash from here and there and you won’t have to give ID. And you might not want to manufacture your explosives from chemicals bought from Home Depot, you CAN manufacture explosives with chemicals bought with cash from here and there. If you know what you’re doing. And if you’re an Islamist terrorist, I think we can take as a given that you’re comfortable with a fairly high level of risk. Kids, don’t try this at home, you might blow yourself up, M’Kay? But if you’re a terrorist you might not care so much.

So my take is that while “Home Depot” is an exaggeration it isn’t that far off the mark. Again, assuming you’ve already got the fissionables.

[Dog80]

Anyone remembers the homedespot.com parody site? It is currently off-line. I tried to find a cached version but to no avail

[Kevbo]

Simple:

1-Rob a Home Depot store…not just the cash, but every thing in the store.
2-Sell resulting haul on ebay.
3-repeat steps 1 & 2 several hundred times without getting caught.
4-Use resulting funds to purchase item from a disenchanted former Soviet scientist.

[Ike_Witt]

Does anyone else envision long lines at Home Depot stores in Tehran and Pyongyang?

[muldoonthief]

@commasense

The design of Little Man, the first gun-type bomb, was so simple, and the scientists’ confidence in its working so high, that they didn’t test it before dropping it on Hiroshima. Probably the only time a weapon has been used in war without being tested first.

Nitpick: Little Boy was the uranium-core gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Fat Man, a plutonium-core implosion-type bomb, was dropped on Nagasaki.

[kanicbird]

@ambushed

My understanding is that a few respected workers claim to have produced trivial but genuine cold fusion, but that claim is very hotly(!) disputed by the larger scientific community. Do you have a cite in the peer-reviewed literature that acknowledges that such claims have been accepted by the majority of physicists?

Sorry ambushed Wiki is as far as I’m going to go on this one, if it’s wrong feel free to rewrite it.

Muon-catalyzed fusion

Muon-catalyzed fusion is a process allowing nuclear fusion to take place at room temperature. Although it can be produced reliably with the right equipment and has been much studied, it is believed that the poor energy balance will prevent it from ever becoming a practical power source.

[kanicbird]

Just some more from Wiki on cold fusion:

Muon-catalyzed fusion

Methods to produce fusion

A variety of methods are known to affect nuclear fusion. Some are “cold” in the strict sense that no part of the material is hot (except for the reaction products), some are “cold” in the limited sense that the bulk of the material is at a relatively low temperature and pressure but the reactants are not, and some are “hot” fusion methods that create macroscopic regions of very high temperature and pressure.

Locally cold fusion :

* Muon-catalyzed fusion is a well established and reproducible fusion process that occurs at ordinary temperatures. It was studied in detail by Steven Jones in the early 1980s. It has not been reported to produce net energy. Net energy production from this reaction is not believed to be possible because of the energy required to create muons, their 2.2 µs half-life, and the chance that a muon will bind to the new alpha particle and thus stop catalyzing fusion.
* low energy nuclear reaction is a controversial line of research to produce nuclear fusion

Which seems to imply that non energy producing cold fusion works and is well known, while the other types of cold fusion is not accepted by mainstream science.

[Tapioca_Dextrin]

@ambushed

But now I’m wondering: What could Shays have been thinking?

Maybe:

Step 1 There is a book called The Poor Man’s James Bond. It explains* how to turn ordinary house hold items or stuff obtainable at Lowes Depot into explosives.

Step 2 There are nuclear bombs in James Bond Movies

Step 3 Profit!

[sub]*incorrectly in almost every circumstance, or so I am imformed[/sub]

[Quartz]

Astro beat me to it. Those with an interest should read Tom Clancy’s Author’s Note at the end of The Sum of All Fears where he describes the ease with which he got all sorts of information.

[commasense]

@muldoonthief

Nitpick: Little Boy was the uranium-core gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Fat Man, a plutonium-core implosion-type bomb, was dropped on Nagasaki.

D’oh! :smack:

[RickJay]

@kanicbird

My understanding is we have done cold fusion (some moion? replacement), but it is endothermic, but is is fusion.

It is possible to get radioactive material at Home Depot, Americum is in smoke detectors. I don’t know how fissiable Americum is however.

1. Not that fissile.

2. A lot of manufacturers have phased out ionization detectors, for various reasons, so you might not be able to find enough of them at Home Depot to whomp up a really good bomb.

[Stalky]

I remember sometime last year I was reading a poltical blog where a commenter asserted you could build an H bomb from reasonably easy to get parts. I won’t repost the whole thing here but here’s the link.

H bomb thing is a tiny bit down the page

Is this legit? Are there flaws to his reasoning? How long would you live after you followed these procedures?

[rbroome]

@ambushed

In the extraordinarily important (if too short) Ted Koppel program “The Price of Security” that aired around 9-11, Representative Christopher Shays (R - CT) asserted that he had been shown by scientists at a national lab (Los Alamos or somewhere) that someone could build a nuclear weapon (not a radiological or “dirty” bomb, but a nuclear explosive) from parts purchased at Home Depot or Lowes. He strongly implied (but did not state outright) that one could build such a weapon solely from such parts, else why bother making such a statement in the first place? After all, to make such a device would probably require screws for example, and screws can of course be purchased from Home Depot, but claiming that someone could make a nuke using some parts from Home Depot is an utterly pointless and ridiculous waste of time. Thus he must have believed that all of the parts necessary could be so purchased.

Now, since my most revered icon is Pearl Forrester, as soon as I heard that news I sent my evil minions to Home Depot to purchase their nuclear weapon kit including all the high explosives and plutonium or U-235 I would need to dominate the world. Alas, they reported that they could find no such material! Naturally, I killed them for their incompetence. But now I’m wondering: What could Shays have been thinking? What might the national weapons lab scientists have actually meant?

Or was this just more contemptible Republican fear-mongering, as I suspect it was?

he was fear-mongering and pandering to the talk-shows. I imagine that technically he might be correct. You could probably buy enough raw material (aluminum, steel, wood, shovels, etc ) to go out and dig up enough Ur ore and build yourself an enrichment plant and an explosives factory etc. Be a heck of a credit card bill though.

[Sam_Stone]

I assume he meant that assuming terrorists got their hands on some fissile material, they could build the rest of the bomb from parts purchased at Home Depot.

For a very crude, low-yield gun type bomb, that might be possible. All you’re doing there is taking a slightly subcritical mass of fissile material and injecting enough extra mass in the center to make the whole thing go critical. But I believe a bomb like this would require a lot of material and probably be quite large.

And implosion bomb is much harder. You can’t just use Amphenol or some other home-made explosive - it has to be extremely high-speed, even burning stuff. The exact knowledge of what kind of explosive you need is classified. Likewise, you need special high speed detonators, and they have to be arranged properly with an electronic timing circuit setting them off. That information is also classified.

The book mentioned earlier, about the undergrad who made working plans for a bomb, is true. But he did it by simply phoning the manufacturers of the materials and asking them for the data. They gave it to him - and got in a world of trouble over it. I don’t think he actually called them up and said, “I need explosives for a nuclear bomb” - rather, he just extracted the details with a little subterfuge. I can’t remember exactly what he did, but it was something like guessing the brand name of the explosive and then calling them and asking for a data sheet, or coming up with a fake use that had the same requirements as the bomb, and asking then which explosives they had that would match the specs. He did te same with the detonators. I believe at the time the info was unclassified, but after he made the plans the government classified it all. It’s been about 20 years since I read the book though, so my memory is a bit hazy.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@ambushed

To do what you suggest is essentially equivalent to building an entire high-tech, industrialized civilization from scratch using nothing but what you could buy from Home Depot.

You left out the most important part, which is the knowledge. Had the guys in the Manhattan Project already known how to make a bomb, and had knowledge multipliers like computers and the internet, I am sure they could have done it in just a couple of months. It’s easier doing what someone has already done.

[The_Scrivener]

I’m suspending judgement until the “Mythbusters” crew tackles it.

And I thought the “exploding cement-mixer truck” was a good show…

[mks57]

@Sam Stone

And implosion bomb is much harder. You can’t just use Amphenol or some other home-made explosive - it has to be extremely high-speed, even burning stuff. The exact knowledge of what kind of explosive you need is classified. Likewise, you need special high speed detonators, and they have to be arranged properly with an electronic timing circuit setting them off. That information is also classified.

Much of that information has been declassified. They used Composition B and Baratol for the explosive lenses. The general idea is that you use combination of a “slow” explosive and a “fast” explosive to build the explosive lenses. The hard part is figuring out the exact geometry of the explosive lenses and initiation points, to produce a shock wave that will crush the fissile core to the necessary density for a chain reaction.

Even if you had a complete set of blueprints, you would have a difficult time obtaining the explosives and many of the necessary parts without setting off all sorts of alarms.

[astro]

Explosive lens design & geometry