<story><title>This experiment proved that anyone could design a nuclear weapon</title><url>http://io9.com/this-experiment-proved-that-anyone-could-design-a-nucle-510618426</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Mvandenbergh</author><text>&amp;#62;In the 1960s World War II was well over, and the United States and the Soviet Union were both settling into a nice, long, cold war. Both countries were nervous, knowing that each had designed and built nuclear weapons. At least, though, they were the only two countries that could manage it.
Nice article but it gets the time-scales slightly wrong.&lt;p&gt;The Soviet Union tested their first device in 1949.&lt;p&gt;The United Kingdom in 1952 (and their first thermonuclear bomb in 1957).&lt;p&gt;France in 1960.&lt;p&gt;China in 1964.&lt;p&gt;So by the time this programme began, all the countries in the NPT nuclear club already had fission bombs and at least the UK had a hydrogen bomb. The idea was not to figure out which country would be third but just how many nuclear powers there would be. 1967 is only one year before the first countries signed the NPT so proliferation was clearly on everyone&apos;s mind at that time.</text></comment>
<story><title>This experiment proved that anyone could design a nuclear weapon</title><url>http://io9.com/this-experiment-proved-that-anyone-could-design-a-nucle-510618426</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>venus</author><text>Good quote from one of the comments:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62;&amp;#62; “With modern weapons-grade uranium, the background neutron rate is so low that terrorists, if they have such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material onto the other half. Most people seem unaware that if separated HEU [Highly Enriched Uranium] is at hand it’s a trivial job to set off a nuclear explosion … even a high school kid could make a bomb in short order.” - Luis Alvarez, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 1988</text></comment>