I’m not afraid of nuclear energy. When I was a kid I used to dream of becoming a nuclear physicist. My dreams were dashed when I made it to high school and tried to take physics.
With the disaster in the Gulf and the mine explosion in West Virginia, more and more folks are thinking about the use of nuclear energy again. But there still remains those who fear the worst about the generation of nuclear power. They can’t get Three Mile Island and Chernobyl out of their minds.
But the generation of nuclear power is not what scares me. It’s the idiots that want to misuse it that scare me.
Even with the secrecy shrouding the development of nuclear power, and especially the “bomb”, the possibility of someone getting their hands on what’s needed to build a complete atomic bomb is something to think about.
We’ve had many news reports of brilliant college students building working models of “the bomb”… but now comes the story of a normal everyday truck driver in Wisconsin.
“It doesn’t take a Saddam Hussein or a Kim Jong Il to build atomic bombs. John Coster-Mullen has done it unaided. And he’s a Wisconsin truck driver.
Rest assured, Coster-Mullen won’t commit genocide: his bombs have no nuclear fuel. But this college dropout has determined the design of the bombs dropped over Hiroshima (“Little Boy”) and Nagasaki (“Fat Man”), and built an exact replica of Little Boy. “I’ve spent 15 years and thousands of hours reading declassified documents, studying photographs and interviewing people who were involved with the bombs”, he says. “The secret of the atomic bombs is that they’re easy to make.”
Coster-Mullen, who calls the bombs his obsession, conducts mental calculations of the bombs’ design during his night-time routes on deserted highways. “I found a paragraph here, a sentence there, and finally was able to reverse-engineer them”, the trucker explains. “I’m still making improvements, but since 9/11 the government has made it harder to access information.”” (Elizabeth Braw for Metro and the Huffington Post)
“Today someone could eliminate Manhattan with a nuclear weapon the size of a basketball.” says Coster-Mullen.
So, to all of you living somewhere on the island, if you see a kid with a basketball that doesn’t bounce – or a kid actually put down the ball and walk away from it then you know that somethings amiss….. and you best make things right with your maker.