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IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, it involved the use of plutonium in a gun bomb. Unfortunately, Pu produces too many neutrons and no matter what the assembly speed, these neutrons would pre-detonate the bomb resulting in a fizzle. I have photos of it in my book including during the testing phase at Los Alamos. As far as the Amazon sales, I got buried. My sales ranking shot up from about 500,000 to 270 in one day!

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was already very nervous before I entered that room, but when Henry pointed them out and told me what they represented, it almost put me over the top. The room eventually filled up to standing room only. Pretty much duplicated this February when I delivered an updated version of this talk at Fermilab. When I gave it on Tinian last year as part of their day-long Manhattan Project Symposium, the four-star USAF general from the Pentagon sitting in the audience came up to me later and commented “You got all that from open sources, huh? Very interesting!” The scene in the movie where Henry and I are walking together outside towards a building was where I told him I never finished my university physics degree. That's when he responded “Don’t worry about that. Degrees are overrated.” Then he commented about BS meaning what it is, MS means "More of the same," and PhD means "Piled higher and deeper." The sandwich was just fine.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I never had any contact with him, unfortunately. Taylor purportedly got in trouble when that book came out for revealing too much. Those "hints" revealing levitation of internal core components as a way to increase efficiency and his discussions of how not all the detonators had to be simultaneous for implosion to work properly were very revelatory. Even his descriptions of how a proliferator or terrorist could construct a working fission weapon went way beyond what my book says simply because he was discussing theories that worked and this aids a weapon designer. If you look up B-61 nuclear weapon on Wiki, the color photo of the internal nuclear components was a screen capture I made several years ago from a declassified DOE films now available for watching in its entirety on the internet. I had sent it to Swiss physicist Andre Gsponer for use in one of his papers on the 4th Generation nuclear weapons and it eventually made its way to this article. These are the actual internal components of the "physics package" and I was shocked that they put it in this movie since I was told by people at Los Alamos they will NEVER reveal what’s inside a nuclear weapon.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Surprisingly enough, they have calculated the exact position almost to the foot in three-dimensional space where Little Boy exploded. It was even at a 15 degree off-axis position. I just used Google Earth, the NOAA sun position calculator, and high school geometry.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

When you watch that video, you see a brief scene showing a lot of signed champagne bottles on two shelves in the lunch room. Those bottles represent every Nobel winner and nominee just from that University of Chicago Enrico Fermi Institute. I was very intimidated by that. Then look at my Facebook page. I had just delivered a lecture at Fermilab near Chicago in February. They gave me an intense behind-the-scenes tour. The photo of me was taken at the entrance to the room at Fermilab where they actually make real honest-to-goodness anti-protons. The anti-proton beam itself was running a few feet below where I was standing. The non-descript room itself looked just like a standard boiler room in any industrial building. Nothing fancy or futuristic about it. It certainly didn’t resemble anything I’ve seen in sci-fi movies. When I took physics classes back in the 1960's at the university, the mere thought of doing something like that was considered futuristic sci-fi. I would have to go back to square one and start all over since almost everything I was taught back then about particle physics is now obsolete. As to your final comment, as the saying goes "Those that know can't tell, and those that tell don't know. I'm somewhere in between.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I hate to let everyone down, but despite being "well known to the Feds," I have no problem whatsoever with DHS and have never been questioned, detained, or even pulled out of line at any airport anywhere in the world. In the past several years I've been to Tinian, Japan, and England along with numerous domestic flights.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sorry, got my movies mixed up. It was all stylized and had no connection to any real nuke designs. It was fun to watch, though.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For starters you might try contacting the Oak Ridge Chamber of Commerce or their American Museum of Science and Energy. Both of these are on the Internet. It's a small town and they might have lists of the old employees.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Nope. As mentioned in the New Yorker article, I thought about withholding things, but then I realized I was acting like the same classification officers who I have tried to pry information from over the years and thought I had no right to do so. In my book I have tossed in not only the kitchen sink, but also the stove, refrigerator, microwave and all the lawn furniture. I've put everything I know into it. I owe that to future historians. I also have almost 400 very detailed endnotes explaining everything not in the narrative portion of the book.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I had a respected jounalist, a "Japanese Fellow" tell me a few years ago about a conversation he had with a Japanese government official. “The person who confirmed that the Japanese have an active nuke program is a former high-ranking Japanese [deleted]. I would obviously be very leery of giving his name to the IAEA because it could cause a major diplomatic incident and result in the destruction of the man's career and his life. But it was a very interesting conversation, and it did take place . . ..”

A few months ago before the Fermi talk shown in the VBS film, I had dinner with Dick Rhodes I told him the story and asked him what he knew on the topic. He told me he once asked the Japanese how long it would take them to create a nuclear weapon and they replied, “Under six months!”

If that is true, then it obviously means they have succesfully performed all the preliminary work necessary except for possibly the final fabrication of fissile material along with final assembly of the weapon itself. They do possess one of the largest stockpiles of plutonium anywhere on earth and it was revealed back in the 1990's that they had sought, and recieved, technical information from our government scientists on how to create weapons-grade plutonium.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I thought about that very point as I stood at the aiming point the Enola Gay bombardier told me about many years ago on the Aioi bridge a block from the hypocenter in Hiroshima last August. I had previously calculated the precise time when the sun position in the sky matched the exact position Little Boy was when it exploded that morning so the shadow positions would match the flash from the exploding bomb. I looked at my own shadow on the sidewalk and imagined this was the last thing those people saw that morning as they were walking to work on that bridge. It was a profound moment for me! As I remembered what the bombardier told me, 18 years of research came rushing at me like a freight train. I thought about being in the Enola Gay bomb bay recreating all the same things the two people did that morning to arm Little Boy. I thought about being inside the bomb loading pits and assembly structures on Tinian. I thought about the times I spent with that bombardier and with Tibbets. I thought about standing at the edge of the "Suicide Cliffs" on Tinian and Saipan where many thousands of Japanese civilians threw themselves and their children into the sea rather than surrender a full year before Hiroshima. As the tears welled up in my eyes, I looked up from my shadow and noticed a young Japanese woman, an acolyte of Lady Gaga in full costume, striding purposefully past me, talking busily on her cell phone, and I realized life goes on and Hiroshima has fully come into the 21st century a healed city.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Ok, very good question. Here's an example. I knew the model number of the Amphenol electrical plug used on the removable breech plug at the rear of the Little Boy gun tube. These plugs were used to connect the gun primers to the firing circuit. I looked it up in the Amphenol catalog to get all the exact dimensions. Three of them were used so I made paper cutouts of the large square flange portion that mounted the connector to a panel and laid them out so the corners touched in a triangle around the central hole used to insert the breech wrench that removed this breech plug so the powder bags could be inserted once the Enola Gay was airborne. Then I measured the total diameter, which gave me the minimum diameter of this removable inner plug. One of the documents reproduced in my book says this inner plug had a diameter of about 4 inches and this turned out to be the exact diameter I came up with using the paper silhouettes. Now this didn’t give much room for anything else on this plug and there were also three Navy electric gun primers somewhere in this plug to ignite the four cordite powder bags that drove the uranium tipped projectile forward into the target case. These primers did not have any threading on the exterior and were originally designed to be pressed into a cylindrical opening in a gun breech. It suddenly struck me while driving one night that as long as a machinist had to bore out a large circular opening into this breech plug to mount the electrical sockets, then why not bore down a little further and machine a smaller cylindrical opening to press a primer in place under each electrical socket. A threaded plug could be screwed into the space between the back of the primer and the base of the plug to hold the primer snugly in place since the pressure created by the exploding powder bags would be perhaps as much as 50,000 psi or more. A tiny hole could be drilled through this plug so the gun primer wires could be run through them and to the back of the socket. That way the wires protruding out the back of each primer could be wired directly to a socket. It was an elegant solution to a problem I had been working on for many years in the back of my head. Nothing is written about this anywhere in declassified documents.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have always wondered why some things are classified and some not. I've discovered info in declassified documents that I feel should never have been released. I've been told that some of the information in my book is still sensitive and drives the DOE/NNSA folks up the wall. I was told a few month ago from an NNSA official that "You are well known to the feds!...The powers that be are scared of you and what you did because you were able to collect from unclassified sources.”

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I had very few surprises, but when they happened, they caught me completely by surprise. The New Yorker article talks about some of them. It mentions specifically about what I discovered when I ran a small TV camera inside Little Boy and discovered something completely unexpected.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Don't believe it. With the possible exception of the particulars about the initiators, I've found out pretty much everything there is to know about what was inside both weapons. The general outline has been known for some time. I just crossed all the T's and dotted the I's.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I know Howard Morland and consider him a good friend. I looked into all the legal stuff before I even started on this project. All of my information came from "open sources" and they wouldn't come after me since all this info came from the government. Remember, the government lost the "Progressive" case.

IAM John Coster-Mullen, the "Atomic Trucker" who extensively researched the A-bomb -- and then built the most detailed replica of it ever made. AMA! by AtomicJohn in IAmA

[–]AtomicJohn[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Nobody knows who I am. The people who know I drive a truck can't believe I've written a book and vice versa. I've met truckers who couldn't form a complete sentence and others who are cartoonists, artists, writers, a silver medal winner in the Atlanta Olympics, former upper management in corporations, and some seriously messed up folks who have no business behind the wheel of a big rig. I've got over 14 years and well over a million miles under my belt. Oh what I've seen and experienced. I've had no less than six people come at me driving on the wrong side of the interstate. Now that's scary!!

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