So our esteemed leader is now warning us that Iran has, or soon will have, Weapons of Mass Destruction?

My goo'ness, where have we heard that before!??

As George W. Bush so wisely and eloquently said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and—er—um—uh—well, you just can't fool me again. . . ?"

Right, Little Hawk! At the age of 14, I "had knowledge" of how to make nuclear weapons.

If I remember correctly, it was in late August or early September of 1945 that Life Magazine came out with a special issue all about the recently (and explosively) revealed atomic bomb. Along with many photographs as usual, it contained a two-page spread of technical information, complete with diagrams, on how an atomic bomb works. With the physics, known at the time by any high school physics teacher (and their brighter students), combined with a bit of tricky, but doable engineering (among other things, of getting the timing of slapping a couple of non-critical mass pieces of Uranium 235 or Plutonium together to create critical mass, along with the sudden insertion of a beryllium rod—beryllium, when bombarded by Alpha particles from the radioactive Uranium or Plutonium surrounding it, emits a shower of neutrons, which further assures that the said surrounding material will begin to react, and fission takes place; it all happens within a few microseconds). The main problem for a high school physics student would be getting the Uranium or Plutonium.

That was the atomic bomb. Now, I am a little fuzzy about the engineering of a hydrogen bomb, but I know that an H-bomb uses an atomic bomb as a trigger (!) to create sufficient heat to cause hydrogen to fuse, which, in turn, produces helium—and a whole lot of energy.

You could buy the magazine off the newsstands for 10¢. Or, since this was a special issue, it may have been 15¢. We had a subscription.

After posting this, I will quite possibly be arrested for revealing nuclear secrets.

Don Firth