In 1976, Princeton junior John Aristotle Phillips wrote a physics term paper detailing how to build a nuclear bomb using only publicly available information. He received an A, but the paper was immediately classified by the government and he was visited by FBI agents and Pakistani officials seeking the design.
The College Student Who Designed a Nuclear Bomb for a Term Paper
John Aristotle Phillips was struggling. The Princeton junior had a less-than-stellar GPA and desperately needed an impressive project to save his academic career. His solution? Design a nuclear bomb.
For his physics independent study in 1976, Phillips decided to prove a terrifying point: that any reasonably intelligent person could design a functional atomic weapon using only publicly available information.
The Research
Phillips spent four months holed up in the engineering library, poring over declassified documents, physics textbooks, and government reports available to anyone with a library card. He consulted no classified materials and spoke to no weapons experts.
His 34-page paper detailed the construction of an implosion-type plutonium bomb similar to "Fat Man," the weapon dropped on Nagasaki. The design included specifications for the explosive lenses needed to compress the plutonium core, the triggering mechanism, and the overall assembly.
The Grade—and the Fallout
His professor, Freeman Dyson (a legendary physicist who had worked on nuclear projects), gave Phillips an A on the paper. But the grade came with complications.
Word spread quickly about what the underachieving junior had accomplished. Within weeks:
- The FBI showed up to question Phillips
- The paper was classified by the government
- Pakistani officials contacted him, expressing interest in the design
- A letter arrived from a French terrorist group requesting a copy
Phillips never got his term paper back. The government determined that while each individual piece of information was publicly available, his synthesis of that information into a workable design crossed a line.
The Point He Proved
Phillips had set out to demonstrate the inadequacy of nuclear safeguards, and he succeeded beyond his expectations. His paper proved that the information barrier to nuclear weapons was essentially nonexistent—the only real obstacles were obtaining the fissile material and the engineering precision to build the device.
The episode sparked serious discussions about nuclear proliferation and the limits of "security through obscurity." If an undergraduate with a mediocre GPA could design a bomb, what about well-funded state actors or terrorist organizations?
After Princeton
Phillips leveraged his newfound notoriety into a book deal, publishing "Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid" in 1978. He later ran for Congress twice (unsuccessfully) and eventually founded Aristotle International, a political technology company.
His term paper remains classified to this day. But the lesson it taught—that nuclear secrets aren't really secret—changed how the government thought about proliferation risks. Sometimes the most dangerous thing isn't hidden knowledge. It's the realization that the knowledge was never really hidden at all.