The National Security Archive has published recently declassified documents related to the “Nth Country Project,” a Cold War era experiment involving a DIY nuclear weapons project. Worried over the possible spread of nuclear weapons, the nuclear scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab hired three young physicists to see if they could design and test their own nuclear weapon.
The documents include a long report written by the team who designed the DIY nuke, a two-page briefing memo, and a long and heavily redacted report about a classified briefing tour the team gave after they’d completed the experiment. The last document is new and details a road show the scientists did about their experiment, in which they toured the country and gave interviews about how they’d developed an open-source nuclear weapon.
The new document is titled “Postshot Activities of the Nth Country Experiment” and includes a lot of lighthearted touches for a document about three just-graduated physics students who designed a nuke. There’s a cartoon depicting college students whose protests are backed up by the power of the atom bomb and a strange drawing of a man constructing a nuke while a black cat arches it back nearby.
“The details on their presentation are quite fun—i.e., the little slides and drawings. It feels rather silly for it to be as nearly-completely redacted as it is, given that the entire point of the Nth Country Experiment is to point out that this kind of heavy-handed secrecy is not what would prevent even a country with no more than three PhD physicists from designing a weapon… and that was based on what knowledge was available publicly 60 years ago, and with access to ‘supercomputers’ that any modern desktop machine would put to shame. But rules are rules, I suppose,” Alex Wellerstein, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology and expert in the history of nuclear secrecy, told Gizmodo.
The moment Robert Oppenheimer successfully tested the world’s first nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, America began to worry about nuclear weapons falling into the “wrong hands.” Russia tested its first nuke just four years later. The U.K. got the bomb in 1952, followed by France in 1960, and nuclear wonks in D.C. began to worry that every country in the world would soon have a nuclear weapon.
Nuclear science was a closely guarded and well-kept secret. The detonation of the first atomic bomb took an incredible amount of time, resources, and secrecy. Every subsequent country’s development was a little easier. How hard would it be, American experts wondered, for a country’s scientists to build one of these world-ending weapons based on readily available information?
They called it the “Nth Country Problem,” and to solve it they designed the “Nth Country Experiment”
“[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] started its Nth Country Experiment in May 1964, to see if a few capable physicists, unfamiliar with nuclear weapons and with access only to the unclassified technology could produce a credible weapon design,” a declassified document posted by the NSA read. The plan was for the experiment to end after a year, but they gave them three.
“Three young PhD physicists, working part-time, succeeded in achieving a workable nuclear weapons design in a period of about three years,” the documents said. The conclusion, then, was that a dedicated group of scientists working for a foreign government with the right resources and knowledge set could build a nuclear weapon.
This turned out to be correct. During the course of the experiment, China detonated its first nuclear weapon. India and Pakistan followed a decade later. Israel, whose nuclear weapons program is shrouded in secrecy, likely got its nuclear weapon around the time the Nth Country Experiment concluded. South Africa and Libya both had nuclear weapons programs that were close to completion before they abandoned them for political reasons.
The documents noted that it was remarkable what three dedicated physicists with time and knowledge could accomplish. “The people at Los Alamos had advantages of manpower and experience (including the presence of some of the world’s outstanding physicists) and the motivational climate in which they worked,” the documents said. “We had the advantages of knowing that a bomb could be built and of having access to a large quantity of literature on shock waves, explosives, nuclear physics and reactor technology which has been published since 1945.”
Wellerstein was happy to read the documents but wondered why so much of the new one was still classified. “The value to declassifying that information is not just lurid fascination, but it would help understand what aspects of this experiment were a true ‘replication’ or not,” he said.
“Did they take a different pathway to thinking about bomb design than actual bomb designers at Los Alamos would have done at the time? That is more interesting, to me, than the ‘final results’ (the bomb design),” Wellerstein said. “How many pathways are there to the same results? How much does an ‘open source’ approach privilege one pathway or another? This kind of thing is missing because of the redactions, unfortunately. Which, again, feels fairly silly given the entire point of the exercise.