"How to Build a Nuclear Bomb"
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff WriterThursday, March 2, 2006; A19

Room 211A, 6:15 to 8:05 p.m.
(Materials not supplied.)
If a nuclear-free Iraq graduates from President Bush's "axis of evil" list, could Georgetown University gain admission?
It all depends on those signed up for "How to Build a Nuclear Bomb," a class at the university's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. On a recent Wednesday, 20 graduate students attended the class, part of a year-long course titled "Nuclear Technologies and Security," at the school's Center for Peace and Security Studies.
Clutching publications such as "Deadly Arsenals," "Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy" and other light reading, the students, a mix of men and women in their twenties dressed in jeans and preppy shirts, crammed into small desks for a two-hour lecture by Charles D. Ferguson, a physicist, former naval officer and scholar who worked at the State Department's nonproliferation bureau and at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"It definitely sounds like there's a proliferation concern there," a somewhat startled senior White House official said after hearing about the program.
Most of the students hope to pursue careers in the intelligence community or the foreign service, specializing in nonproliferation issues, not weapons design. Graduates of such programs a decade ago are now wrestling with national security issues such as the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea.
"You need a class like this because many people who work in the policy world have a sophisticated understanding of foreign cultures and the difficulties and challenges surrounding nuclear issues but not the science that underlies many of those concerns," said Daniel Byman, director of the security studies program. "It complements other classes in the program, such as proliferation in general and Iran foreign policy."
But if those in the room (and based on some of the questions, there were at least two such students) thought they'd be able to walk out with the exact recipe for a nuclear bomb -- one of the most tightly guarded secrets in the U.S. government -- they were disappointed.
"I'm not giving away the family secrets or the crown jewels. What I've learned is through open sources," said Ferguson, an adjunct professor and an expert on nuclear terrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Relying on crude drawings to illustrate an implosion device, how uranium is enriched to weapons grade and where high explosives are placed in the simplest of nuclear devices, Ferguson sought to give his class the best view possible without inadvertently training a new generation of bomb designers.
"These are cartoons," Ferguson said repeatedly. "You couldn't use these to assemble a bomb."
The basic mechanics of an atomic bomb -- from the earliest devices dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, to the most sophisticated thermonuclear designs -- have been widely known for decades. Ferguson reviewed them all, discussing the two traditional pathways for a bomb, using uranium or plutonium, as well as the history of weapons design. Some students seemed surprised to discover that building the world's most devastating device was more difficult than they imagined. One complained that it didn't "seem that easy."
"Well, a lot of the tricks of the trade are still not openly known," Ferguson offered in a somewhat consoling tone. After a technical first hour, he introduced the class to Howard Morland, a retired freelance journalist whose 1979 article in the Progressive magazine described the inner workings of the hydrogen bomb. The government sued Morland to prevent him from publishing the article but dropped the case six months later, in part because Morland successfully argued that he had been able to figure it out by piecing together information that had already been made public.
Addressing the class, Morland, an anti-nuclear activist, tried to discuss the dangers of nuclear arsenals and the need to dismantle them. Instead, he found himself under siege.
Todd Konkel, who is pursuing a master's degree in security studies, appeared to express the views of several students when he complained about publishing state secrets of any kind. Twenty-seven years later, however, Konkel said, not much harm appears to have been done by Morland's articles. They did not tip off future weapons states, as had been feared, or lead to the kind of public outcry over nuclear weapons that would prompt their dismantlement.
After the lecture, Konkel, who hopes to work for the government on nuclear issues after he graduates this year, went home to watch the Grammys. U2 took home the top prize for album of the year: "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb."