Meet the Nuclear Weapons Nerds

close-up-of-motherboard_4460x4460

#TIA – Our knowledge of nuclear weapons got a little too close for comfort when it turned out that everyone can have one

“John Coster-Mullen was driving his truck to a warehouse in Oshkosh, Wisconsin when he told me that he owns uranium. He’d been talking on the phone for about hour, and I hadn’t been able to ask a single question about the project that has consumed a quarter century of his lifethe reverse-engineering of America’s first nuclear bomb. I was too engrossed to interrupt. The news of uranium, though, made me stutter.

The kind of uranium Coster-Mullen owns isn’t used in nuclear weapons. Not all uranium can blow up the better part of Manhattan—just one of many facts I learned while digging into the community of people who collect images, scholarship, and artifacts relating to nuclear weapons, and yes, even uranium. Stepping into their world of compulsive collecting and dedicated communicating, you begin to understand that this terrible, powerful, almost supernatural deadly force is very much a human creation. “

Read more at Gizmodo