Home-made WMD

I’ve long wondered whether fears that terrorists could actually make a nuclear bomb are justified. This fascinating Guardian article reveals that the Pentagon actually tried to find out in the 1960s, by recruiting two physics students under conditions of absolute secrecy and telling them to get on with it. The methodology for the test was interesting (the students would work out a design and then it would be secretly validated by Los Alamos scientists), but the outcome was alarming: given access to the necessary fissile material, the students could have done it. Hmmm.

Thanks to FAB, who spotted that the first sentence, as originally published, lacked a verb. What a thing it is to have punctilious readers!