RTFA: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/0812…

The first edition of “Atom Bombs” was completed in 2003. With the publication of the book, which has since undergone several hundred revisions, Coster-Mullen became a leading member of the loosely organized scholarly fraternity dedicated to challenging the ethic of secrecy behind the atomic security state. Its dozen or so members included Richard Rhodes; Chuck Hansen, a computer programmer whose Freedom of Information Act requests helped him assemble “The Swords of Armageddon,” a twenty-nine-hundred-page, seven-volume archive of documentary information about the U.S. nuclear arsenal; Howard Morland, who published the first detailed sketch of a thermonuclear weapon, in The Progressive, in 1979; and Carey Sublette, a programmer in California, who has posted a wealth of data about atomic weapons on the Internet.

Coster-Mullen fulfills orders for “Atomic Bombs” himself, by running off copies and then mailing them. (The book is available through Amazon, and costs $49.95.) According to a recent log of purchase information, “Atomic Bombs” is sought after mainly by people whose e-mail addresses identify them as members of the nation’s secret nuclear archipelago: LANL, LLNL, SNL, ORNL, ANL, Pantex, Fermilab, the Hanford and Savannah River nuclear plants, the F.B.I.

“Thanks again for the great book,” a nuclear worker named Lee recently wrote to Coster-Mullen. “As soon as I finish it, my son, who’s on the 61 program”-maintaining the stockpile of variants of the original B-61 nuclear bombs-”will be reading it, probably in one of the assembly bays.”

Many customers seem to enjoy thumbing their noses at U.S. security officials, who remain determined to keep the bomb’s precise technical specifications a mystery. Harold Agnew, the former director of Los Alamos, recently wrote to Coster-Mullen, “The real problem with the security people is that they are basically ignorant and maybe just plain stupid. I guess if they just say no to everything they believe they have job security and won’t get into trouble with their equally stupid bosses.” Agnew added that he had suggested to security officials at Los Alamos that they invite Coster-Mullen to give a talk on how he did his research-”so in the future if there really is something they want to keep close, they might have a clearer idea as to how to do it.”

In March, 2007, after an extended debate within the community of civilian nuclear obsessives, Coster-Mullen’s revisionist diagrams of Little Boy and the core of the Fat Man bomb were posted on Wikipedia. Accurate information about how a simple nuclear bomb is made, and how it works, is now available to anyone with Internet access. “Before 9/11, I found our government’s emphasis on secrecy abhorrent,” Richard Rhodes told me. “I find it even more so now.” Rhodes considers absurd the idea that a foreign government or terrorist might build a bomb based on Coster-Mullen’s diagrams. “Everyone who is sufficiently sophisticated in these matters hardly needs the help of us poor souls, who aren’t even scientists,” he said. Rhodes said of the U.S. government’s classification efforts, “The point is to keep the bombs out of sight, to make us feel that the bombs aren’t real, and that is John’s real contribution. The notion that we are safer because we have all these bombs tucked away is a huge fraud.”

This is a fascinating essay about one man’s mission to reverse-engineer the original atomic bombs that ended World War II. There are two main angles here: one is that it’s fun to understand something that is specifically forbidden, and the other is that it doesn’t really matter anymore if these plans are public. The first atomic bombs are like the equivalent of mail-order computer kits from the 1970s – the kind that you soldered together yourself. Now, anyone can mail-order a computer – literally for a few dollars – that is millions of times more powerful than the 1970s kit. Nuclear weapons are pretty comparable to computers, in this respect.

Anyway, this is a highly recommended read.