WHAT HAPPENED WHEN A PRINCETON STUDENT WROTE A PAPER ON HOW TO MAKE A NUCLEAR BOMB?
Usually, Princeton student don’t write reports/papers on how to construct nuclear bombs. But, in 1976, John Phillips did just that. Not only did the report include designs about the bomb, it included details about how to construct one better than the one dropped on Nagasaki.
Phillips got an A+ on the paper, but shortly after the story went public, he was approached by someone who wanted to buy the paper off of him – and that was enough for the FBI to intervene and confiscate the paper.
It’s safe to assume it was never Phillips’ intention to get the FBI involved, he even mentioned that all the information that he used to create the paper was used from publicly available resources. And in his own words: “It’s very simple. Any undergraduate physics major could have done what I did.” And thus, any “terrorist could… too.”
The New York Times reported on the incident back in 1976, and said Phillip’s had “prepared a 34‐page report said to contain plans for a crude plutonium device weighing 125 pounds and allegedly carrying a charge one‐third as powerful as the one detonated over Hiroshima in World War II.“
Funnily enough, some years later, “Phillips became an anti-nuclear-proliferation activist, even running for congress several times on that platform”. Some turnaround that…!