<story><title>John A Phillips</title><url>https://nuclearprinceton.princeton.edu/people/john-phillips-1955-present</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alkonaut</author><text>If you just want a bad atomic bomb, isn&amp;#x27;t it enough to put 2 chunks of fissile (enough) material at either end of a very thick steel tube and shoot them together using explosives? The question is how you use $2k to buy or produce the fissile material, because if the BOM was really $2k including &amp;quot;weapons grade&amp;quot; fissile material then the interesting question is how to get the fissile material that cheaply.&lt;p&gt;If the BOM is $2k &lt;i&gt;excluding&lt;/i&gt; the fissile material then... is that really surprising? I thought crude bomb designs were pretty easy to create if you have no interest in maximizing yield or minimizing how dirty the bomb gets?</text></comment>
<story><title>John A Phillips</title><url>https://nuclearprinceton.princeton.edu/people/john-phillips-1955-present</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danbruc</author><text>... if you happen to have a critical mass of enriched Uranium [1] laying around in your garage.&lt;p&gt;[1] Preferably not in a single lump.</text></comment>