How to Build Your Very Own Nuclear Warhead: A Fun DIY Project For the Whole Family.
Nine countries have done it, so why can't you? Spend some time with the kids and supercharge the neighborhood watch with this handy home defense lifehack.
DISCLAIMER FOR FUCKING IDIOTS: THIS IS PARODY. DO NOT ACTUALLY BUILD A NUCLEAR WEAPON. IT IS AN EXTREMELY STUPID IDEA AND YOU WILL PROBABLY DIE. MOVING ON.
MOLON LABE!
I know what you’re thinking right now. I’ve heard it all before.
“Who needs a nuclear weapon in their house?”
“You’re nine times more likely to kill yourself than kill an intruder with a nuclear weapon.”
“The government has way more nuclear weapons anyway. It’s not like I could defend myself against them.”
Shut up, libtard. The only way to defend yourself against a bad guy with a nuke is to be a good guy with a nuke. Or a badder guy with a nuke. Got a psycho type-A neighbor? You can’t let people push you around. Go to the gym. Get muscles. Start taking taekwondo. Aim a fucking ICBM at his house.
“Hey Gary, move your fucking truck before shit gets geopolitical.”
I realize that a home-based ICBM nuclear deterrent is probably out of the question for most people. They’re cost-prohibitive, the paperwork is a real bitch, and HOAs are such a hassle, even when you threaten the whole block with nuclear hellfire. Karen on the board has nothing to live for anyway, so she’s going to get extra passive-aggressive about your 25 story tower of freedom in the front yard. It really makes you consider taking the billions of dollars you would spend on a nuclear program and just doing something else, like buying a huge mansion or retiring somewhere to laugh at poors.
Don’t do that. You don’t need a fancy-schmancy intercontinental deterrent to keep the neighborhood in check. All you need is a few basic materials that you can pick up at the local hardware store, Amazon, Alibaba, and maybe a couple of shady black markets in Kazakhstan. Very nice!
First, of course, you’re going to need uranium.
When I Googled “where can I buy uranium” a few things happened:
A: I definitely just ended up in a database somewhere
B: One of the top results was a question from Quora entitled “Where Can I Buy Uranium So I Can Eat It.” I don’t really know where to go with that one, but I hope he followed his dreams, if only because I need more material.
C: There’s an online store for uranium ore, right there. It only ships within the U.S. though, so sorry rest of the world looking to solve their noisy neighbor problem with kilotons of blast effect. Something something Second Amendment or whatever.
As we all probably know, or should know anyway, getting your uranium ore is the easy part. You’ve got to refine the stuff. That’s where people get in trouble. Ask Iran.
You just sunk my battleship. Argh! Oh, wait, that was 1988
This is why you do your threatening of annihilation and armageddon and all of that AFTER you get your boom boom. Don’t make that mistake. The HOA and (probably) an air force or two are going to take extra-special care to fuck your day up.
So you want to refine your newly-purchased Internet uranium ore, but you don’t want to see what a squadron of F-35s will do to your home value? Relax, we’ve all been there. What you’re going to need is a centrifuge. Specifically, a gas centrifuge or a Zippe-type centrifuge. You can go to Los Alamos for one of these. I’m sure they’ll be cool with it and won’t ask any questions, but let’s say that possibly the government might take a little interest in why you want to refine uranium and you want to keep things more home-based. Makes sense. Besides, that’s a pretty big commute for most people, and more to the point, who wants to go to New Mexico, anyway? If there’s anything I’ve learned from TV, it’s that New Mexico is full of meth. That stuff is dangerous. Drugs are bad, kids. Stay safe, build your nuclear weapon at home.
Okay, fine, back to Google. I am so fucked at this point. I hope you’re entertained. Anyway, I got on Alibaba and…
$50,000 gets you one of these bad boys. Will it actually do what we need it to do? Probably not, but the factory seems to be very accommodating to special requests
Maybe you’re a little skeptical. Perhaps you’re not feeling like sourcing your nuclear refinement capability sight unseen from a factory in Jiangsu. I can’t imagine why, but okay. Wikipedia helpfully puts up basic diagrams for how gas and Zippe-type cylinders work, along with how they get fucked up. Do find a local physics professor or engineer. I’m sure they can steer you in the right direction. Do not use your real name. Do not download malware. You never know when the Mossad or CIA is going to disable your home-defense system and abduct/shoot your professor. It’s like they don’t even care about your right to defend yourself.
Anyway, now you’ve got your ore, you’ve got your refinery thing, you haven’t been shot…what’s next? Well, you budding Oppenheimer, destroyer of neighborhoods and terror of Garys everywhere, you’ve got some choices now.
Oh, before I forget, you should radiation-proof the shit out of everything. Just buy all the lead you can find. Cover everything in lead. You’ll be fine. The Romans did it and nothing bad happened to them.
Nothing to see here, moving on.
We’ll go basic here. 15-20 kilotons is probably enough deterrence for your average home security system, unless you’ve declared war on a major nation-state. In that case, you’re probably going to have to upgrade a little bit and you probably shouldn’t be such an asshole.
So, there are two basic designs we can work with. You can get fancy and do fusion warheads or tritium-injection, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. You’ve got to walk before you can fly at Mach 20 and obliterate entire metropolitan areas with megaton blasts.
So let’s start with this:
This is a sketch of a gun-type nuclear bomb. This should appeal to Americans because it’s a gun and therefore the Supreme Court will probably rule in your favor if this ever gets to court. You can probably carry a concealed one in Texas. This was the design that was used on the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. All you need is some conventional explosive (you can figure out your own way to get Semtex or RDX. I think they give it out at food banks in Arkansas), a barrel, tampers, a uranium bullet, a uranium target, and so, so much math. You might want some help with this, although ChatGPT will likely do it for you if you find the right prompts. The bullet hits the target, the target does its chain reaction, kablooie. Congratulations, you are now Number 1 on Interpol’s Most Wanted List.
Let’s say that’s not good enough. You’re not working your local physics professor hard enough, he’s chained in your lead-coated basement with nothing to do all day except ponder cancer and he’s getting a little down. Okay, let’s up the challenge a little bit and go for an implosion detonator.
This is from the Wisconsin Project, which aims to “stop nuclear proliferation at the source,” presumably by encouraging it everywhere else but the source. Also, this was based on an Iraqi schematic, which…uhh…wait a minute…
“Was I right about something?” Spoiler alert: no, he was not.
Anyway, there are lots of other blueprints and descriptions of this kind of bomb available on Google and Wikipedia, a whole damn chapter of a Tom Clancy book (The Sum of all Fears) and anywhere you can find the Internet, because fuck it, that’s why. Also, that Iraqi design apparently didn’t work all that well (see: not at fucking all), so you might want to get that physics prof that you’ve chained in the basement to do a little modification. Also, that design is going to need a lot of uranium. You could probably get away with less plutonium if your refining or enrichment is up to scale. I have no idea what Alibaba charges for that…you’ll have to inquire with the factory rep.
The point of an implosion detonator is to surround a core of radioactive explosive stuff with a soccer ball of normally explosive stuff that has to all be triggered at the exact same time, compressing the core, making it go critical, and blam-o. This is difficult, because you’ve got to get all the panels of the soccer ball to ignite at the exact same time or else you’re only going to have a moderately destructive dirty bomb that’s probably still pretty bad.
Pro: It’s more effective. You get a bigger boom in a smaller package.
Con: It’s not covered by the 2nd Amendment. Nothing in the Bill of Rights mentions implosion triggers. Technically they don’t mention guns either though, so maybe you’ve got a case there.
After that you just need to put all the stuff together, slap a remote control detonator of some sort on the thing, and you’re good to go. Fly your Don’t Tread on Me flag with pride, and maybe add a little caveat. This house protected by U-235? Be creative.