Nth Country Experiment
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The ''N''th Country Experiment was an experiment conducted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory starting in May 1964 which sought to assess the risk of nuclear proliferation. The experiment consisted in paying three recent young physicists who had just received their PhDs, though had no prior weapons experience, to develop a working
nuclear weapon design Nuclear weapon designs are physical, chemical, and engineering arrangements that cause the physics package of a nuclear weapon to detonate. There are three existing basic design types: * pure fission weapons, the simplest and least technically ...
using only unclassified information, and with basic computational and technical support. "The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield", the report on the experiment read, "A working context for the experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give a small nation a significant effect on their foreign relations." The experiment ended on April 10, 1967, after only three man-years of work over two and a half calendar years. According to a heavily redacted declassified version of the summary, it was apparently judged by lab weapons experts that the team had come up with a credible design for the technically more challenging implosion style
nuclear weapon A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions ( thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bom ...
. It is likely that they would have been able to design a simpler gun combination weapon even more quickly, though in such a case the limiting factor in developing such a weapon is not usually design difficulty but rather the procurement of material (
enriched uranium Enriched uranium is a type of uranium in which the percent composition of uranium-235 (written 235U) has been increased through the process of isotope separation. Naturally occurring uranium is composed of three major isotopes: uranium-238 (238U ...
). The term "''N''th Country" referred to the goal in assessing the difficulty in developing basic weapons ''design'' (not the development of the weapons themselves) for any potential country with a relatively small amount of technical infrastructure—if the United States was the 1st country to develop nuclear weapons, and the USSR the 2nd, and so on, which would be the ''N''th country? Due to the increased amount of publicly available resources regarding nuclear weapons, it is reasonable to assume that a viable weapon design could be reached with even less effort today. However in the
history of nuclear weapons Nuclear weapons possess enormous destructive power from nuclear fission or combined fission and fusion reactions. Building on scientific breakthroughs made during the 1930s, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and free France collabora ...
, the development of fission weapons was never strongly hindered by basic design questions except in the very first nuclear weapons programs. The Summary Report of the Nth Country Experiment was declassified—though heavily excised—in 2003.


Summary

In April of 1964, physicists David A. Dobson and David N. Pipkorn were hired by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (then known as Livermore Radiation Laboratory) to design a nuclear explosive with "militarily significant yield". The following year, David Pipkorn dropped out of the project and was replaced by Robert W. Seldon, a captain in the
United States Army Reserve The United States Army Reserve (USAR) is a reserve force of the United States Army. Together, the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard constitute the Army element of the reserve components of the United States Armed Forces. Since July 2020 ...
. Like Pipkorn and Dobson, Seldon possessed a physics PhD and had no nuclear expertise.


See also

*
John Aristotle Phillips John Aristotle Phillips (born August 23, 1955) is a U.S. entrepreneur specializing in political campaigns, who became famous for attempting to design a nuclear weapon while a student. "A-Bomb Kid" Phillips was born in August 1955 to Greek immigran ...
— a
Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...
undergraduate who apparently accomplished a similar feat as those in the Nth Country Experiment in 1977. *
Nuclear terrorism Nuclear terrorism refers to any person or persons detonating a nuclear weapon as an act of terrorism (i.e., illegal or immoral use of violence for a political or religious cause). Some definitions of nuclear terrorism include the sabotage of a ...
*
Smyth Report The Smyth Report (officially ''Atomic Energy for Military Purposes'') is the common name of an administrative history written by American physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth about the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to develop atomic bombs du ...
— first U.S. release on nuclear weapons technical information (1945) *''
United States v. The Progressive, et al. ''United States of America v. Progressive, Inc., Erwin Knoll, Samuel Day, Jr., and Howard Morland'', 467 F. Supp. 990 ( W.D. Wis. 1979), was a lawsuit brought against ''The Progressive'' magazine by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) i ...
'' — a court case regarding
Howard Morland Howard Morland (born September 14, 1942) is an American journalist and activist against nuclear weapons who, in 1979, became famous for apparently discovering the "secret" of the hydrogen bomb (the Teller–Ulam design) and publishing it after a ...
constructing the design for the hydrogen bomb from public domain documents.


References

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External links

*Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Livermore
"Summary Report of the NTH Country Experiment,"
W. J. Frank, ed., March 1967
(copy of original report in PDF format)No Experience NecessaryBulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Dan Stober, March/April 2003, pp. 12
Atomic John A truck driver uncovers secrets about the first nuclear bombs.
Physics experiments Nuclear secrecy Nuclear proliferation 1964 in the United States 1964 in science