In this episode, the high school yearbook voted us “Most Likely to Join the Nuclear Club” after we watched the 1986 movie The Manhattan Project where student Paul Stephens builds a nuclear bomb with plutonium stolen from a secret government lab run by the guy dating his mom. How easy is it to build a homemade nuclear weapon? What motivates a brilliant scientist to devote their life to WMD? Do you enter a homemade nuclear bomb at the science fair under the project category of physics, chemistry, or psychopath? Tim Westmyer (@NuclearPodcast) and returning special guest Stephen Schwartz (@AtomicAnalyst) answer these questions and more.
Before we earn extra credit by weaponizing some anthrax in AP Bio class, we recommend:
–Special Bulletin (1983 movie)
–Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes game
-“Fat Man and Little Boy,” The Simpsons, season 16 episode 5
–Science Fair (2018 documentary)
-Ken Silverstein, “The Radioactive Boy Scout,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1998
-Ken Silverstein, The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor, 2005
–The Day After Trinity (1980 documentary)
–WarGames (1983 movie)
-“Nth Country Experiment,” Atomic Heritage Foundation, March 1, 2019
Super Critical Podcast 