In his celebrated how-to-build-an-atomic-bomb paper written as an undergraduate in 1976, John Aristotle Phillips ’78 likewise concluded that the ultimate bomb making challenge wasn’t theoretical but practical: What was the ideal shape and composition of the cluster of explosives needed to trigger the bomb? According to the “A-Bomb Kid” himself, he found the answer to the latter question by simply picking up the phone, calling the head of a division at DuPont, and asking!
In his celebrated how-to-build-an-atomic-bomb paper written as an undergraduate in 1976, John Aristotle Phillips ’78 likewise concluded that the ultimate bomb making challenge wasn’t theoretical but practical: What was the ideal shape and composition of the cluster of explosives needed to trigger the bomb? According to the “A-Bomb Kid” himself, he found the answer to the latter question by simply picking up the phone, calling the head of a division at DuPont, and asking!
It wasn’t so easy at Los Alamos.