Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The 1960s ‘Nth Country Experiment’ (Lawrence Livermore)
Briefing book · written March 1967 · released 1 July 2003
Why this matters
In the mid-1960s Livermore asked a few young physicists with no access to classified weapons data to design a nuclear bomb from open literature alone. They produced a credible implosion design in about two and a half years. The declassified summary is a quiet landmark in proliferation risk assessment.
Read the original
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20030701/
Hosted by National Security Archive (GWU)
Tags
Part of a collection · step 6 of 15
The Nuclear Paper Trail
Livermore tests the answer with three physicists and a library.
Cite
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "The 1960s ‘Nth Country Experiment’ (Lawrence Livermore)." March 1967. Released 1 July 2003. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20030701/ (accessed via The Quiet Archive, QA-0054).
Shelved nearby
- 1960 QA-0033RAND · Study
Diffusion of nuclear weapons to additional countries: the ‘nth country’ problem (RAND RM-2484)
A 1960 RAND study, done for the Air Force, of how and how fast nuclear weapons would spread beyond the first nuclear powers.
- 1962 QA-0031LLNL · Report
Tory II-C hazards of operation (Project Pluto nuclear ramjet), Part 10
Livermore's hazards analysis for Tory II-C, the ground-test reactor of Project Pluto, a nuclear-powered ramjet missile meant to fly for weeks at low altitude while spewing radiation along its route.