Today in the Guardian, the story of two plucky youngsters in 1966 who built their own homebrew A-bomb:
…the two amateurs were ironically aided by information published as part of President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program, which spread word of the benefits of non-military nuclear power around the world. And Atoms for Peace was only the most prominent example of a fad for everything nuclear that propelled a huge amount of technical detail into the public domain.Eventually, towards the end of 1966, two and a half years after they began, they were finished. “We produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved,” says Selden. “The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe’s Machine Shop downtown.”
How two students built an A-bomb
(via Make)