Is it possible for terrorists to develop an atomic bomb?

Jul 9, 2001

By Miles Stair

We have been told that the development of an atomic bomb is too vast a project, highly technical, and far too costly for all but a large and wealthy government to even attempt.

Everyone is familiar with the development of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project was the largest, longest, most costly development program in history, and under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The Project developed an atomic bomb which was tested in the desert near Alamagordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, and two of these bombs were dropped on Japan, first on Hiroshima on August 6th, then Nagasaki on August 9th. This is what our history books tell us. But is it right? No. Not at all.

At the urging of Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 2nd, 1939, to urge the development of an atomic bomb before Germany did. Einstein and his fellow physicists did not know what specific use such a bomb could have to the military, so he said in his letter, This new phenomena would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable - though much less certain - that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.

Without realizing it, Einstein set in motion two very different projects. The first was the development of an airplane big enough to carry a nuclear bomb the B-29. The B-29 was the most technologically complex mass-production aircraft of World War II. The program to built it also represented the largest commitment of resources to a single military aircraft up to that time. Initiated in 1940, the program eventually cost over $3 billion one (1) billion more than the Manhattan Project!

The second effect of Einstein s letter was a direct opening for the Navy. Navy Captain William J. Parsons designed the first atomic bomb, using uranium 235 from the Hanford reactor on the Columbia River in a project started in 1939. Oppenheimer s Manhattan Engineering Project did not get started until late in 1941, and was headquartered at Los Alamos Laboratories, NM, using plutonium from Oak Ridge, Tenn. Captain Parsons had a two year head start on the Manhattan Project!

Captain Parsons had a simple mandate: build a bomb that could be used by the U.S. Navy, and do it quickly. Oppenheimer, however, was to build an implosion bomb using plutonium, a giant technical breakthrough, developing research which could be used for the development of future bombs of various sizes and yields. The two projects thus had virtually nothing in common except the end result of an atomic explosion, and were indeed totally separate developmental projects.

Captain Parsons designed a gun bomb. At Hanford, U-235 was separated from U-238, a slow and laborious process, as U-235 exists in a proportion of one part to 140 parts U-238. Raw uranium was mixed into a slurry, then a chemical and mechanical filter system was used for the element separation. To make plutonium, the U-235 must be bombarded with more neutrons in a nuclear reactor, then another element separation needed to get the pure plutonium. But plutonium has four phase transformations and can go critical all by itself, so it needs to be mixed with gallium for stabilization. Obviously, Parsons had an easier task than did Oppenheimer.

Captain Parsons did not have Oppenheimer as a cooperative partner he had British scientists for help. They helped develop the overall concept and fusing requirements. The specifications for the U-235 gun-bomb used at Hiroshima were complete by February, 1944, according to the Manhattan District History. Hardware for at least three (3) uranium-235 guns was ordered at the end of March, 1944. Basically, the gun-bomb was a 155 mm howitzer breech and 6 feet of barrel, with a ball welded to the end of the barrel. Inside the steel ball was a sphere of U-235 with a conical hole centered on the barrel. The howitzer cartridge was loaded with a pure U-235 bullet with a matching conical nose or point. When fired electrically, the bullet hit the ball of U-235 at high speed, critical mass was achieved, and a nuclear chain reaction resulted in an explosion.

The finished design weighed approximately 9,000 pounds and could be delivered by a B-29. However, it was a Navy weapon, and the British scientists pointed out that the outstanding difficulty of the scheme was that the main principle could not be tested on a small scale it had to be tested at full design size and yield. It was assumed that the design would yield an explosion equivalent to 1.5 tons of TNT.

On May 5, 1943, the Military Policy Committee met and discussed where to use the gun-bomb. The first choice was the Japanese fleet concentration in the Harbor of Truk, but General Styer suggested Tokyo harbor, where it would land in water of sufficient depth to prevent easy salvage if it failed to work. The Japanese were selected for the first use as they would not be so apt to secure knowledge from it as would the Germans, should the bomb fail and be recovered. Ultimately it was realized a test was required before the gun-bomb could be used on the Japanese, and the result of that decision is shocking.

The SS E.A. Bryan victory ship was selected for the test. The ship was first loaded with the gun-bomb, then conventional ammunition and bombs were loaded into the ship over the gun bomb as an intentional cover story for the main blast. At 10:00 PM on July 17, 1944 at Port Chicago, approximately 35 miles northeast from San Francisco, the U-235 gun-bomb was tested by the U.S. Navy. The resulting explosion had an explosive yield exceeding 20,000 tons of TNT, with a nominal yield for the gun-bomb being estimated at 15,000 tons of TNT. White hot chunks of metal the size of houses blew up past aircraft at 9,000 feet near the detonation site. The SS E.A. Bryan, the pier, a 220 ton locomotive on the pier, and approximately 320 black ship munitions loaders were instantly vaporized not a single piece of the locomotive or the ship were ever found. The world had witnessed the first explosion of a nuclear bomb, had seen the unique double flash signature and then the mushroom cloud, but believed the cover story of a conventional munitions explosion. Remember, this was war time and rigid censorship was in place, and no one had ever seen the unique "double flash" signature of an atomic explosion or a mushroom cloud.

The gun-bomb designed by Captain Parsons was a success, was called Little Boy, and the two remaining bombs were ultimately shipped on the cruiser USS Indianapolis to Tinian Island (remember, it was a Navy bomb!), and one of them was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 by the B-29 Enola Gay. The records of the Navy/Parsons gun-bomb project were declassified in 1981.

The Navy eventually bought out the town of Port Chicago, and the depot itself was incorporated into the Concord Naval Weapons Station.

Within a week of the test of his gun-bomb, Captain Parsons was promoted to the rank of Commodore and assigned to Los Alamos as Deputy Director under J. Robert Oppenheimer. After Hiroshima, Parsons was elevated to the rank of Rear Admiral. Parsons died in 1952.

Meanwhile, back at Los Alamos, things were not going well. There was only 74 kilograms of U-235 available by December, 1943. Effective August 1, 1944, Los Alamos Laboratories were reorganized, all work on the U-235 gun-bomb curtailed, and efforts were concentrated on the plutonium-239 Nagasaki bomb, with Commodore Parsons as Division Leader for the Ordnance Engineering Division.

The Fat Man Nagasaki bomb, with a ball of plutonium-239 exploded by means of an implosion caused by shaped charges of conventional explosives, was more difficult to build, and no one knew if it would actually work. It was tested on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. It had an estimated yield of 21,000 tons of TNT. Within two weeks, two additional bombs were built. The second plutonium bomb was loaded on a B-29, but it crashed at an air base between San Francisco and Sacramento, and the bomb was lost. The third bomb, separated into various components, was successfully flown by several B-29's out of Roswell AAB, NM to Tinian Island. At 1:45 AM, August 6 the B-29 Enola Gay took off from Tinian Island; at 8:15 it dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, killing 78,150 Japanese. Three days later the plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 23,753 more.

The U.S. Navy--Parsons gun-bomb has virtually disappeared from mainstream history, and it is assumed that all atomic bombs are plutonium-239 weapons. Rear Admiral Parsons has lost his place in history as the developer of the world s first atomic bomb. Very clever terrorists, however, know how to access the internet and find all the information they need to build it. Even though obsolete and inefficient, it works and works well. This letter, however, is proof that information on the gun-bomb exists!

In the late 1980's, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo began a project to built weapons of mass destruction. Aum Shinrikyo gained notoriety in 1995 when it released extravagant quantities of the nerve gas sarin into the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve people. A search of their records revealed that Aum Shinrikyo had purchased land in the vast Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia -- which had a uranium deposit. Aum Shinrikyo hired Russian nuclear scientists in 1990, and they duplicated the Parsons gun-bomb from raw uranium in the Australian outback At 11:03 PM on May 28, 1993, they successfully tested their gun-bomb, completely unnoticed by anyone!!! Seismograph needles all over the Pacific region noted the very large-scale disturbance near a place called Banjawarn Station, and some prospectors later reported seeing a flash in the sky, but the explosion had no obvious explanation, so it was filed away as an unexplained curiosity.

Fugitive Saudi terrorist-sponsor Osama bin Laden is a billionaire, has an intense hatred of the Great Satan the United States. Bin Laden certainly has the assets and motivation required to build a gun-bomb even if he could not purchase a nuclear weapon from one of the former Soviet states. He knows they can be used on ports and harbors, and getting a fishing vessel loaded with an atomic weapon into a U.S. harbor would be incredibly easy. New York, Washington, DC, and Miami are likely targets for bin Laden, as they represent not only the heart of the United States financial and governmental systems, they also have a large population of another group of people he loathes Jews. It s just a matter of time....