Meet John Coster-Mullen, the Wisconsin truck driver who reverse engineered the atomic bombs America dropped on Japan – all by himself. When asked by a redditor why he did it, this is what he had to say:
I’ve been curious about this starting when I was a child back in the 1950′s. Back then, as now, what was inside an atomic bomb was the biggest secret there was and it would remain that way. The 12/15/08 New Yorker article “Atomic John” goes into more detail. I started in earnest on this in 1993 and was spurred on when I was told by someone at Los Alamos that they would never reveal anything and that I would never find out no matter how hard I tried. I took that as a challenge. The best thing I can say on this subject is if the government doesn’t want us to know anything about atomic weapons, then perhaps they should stop telling us! The Los Alamos Library website has direct, downloadable links to thousands of declassified reports going all the way back to the Manhattan Project. I am continually surprised at to what they have declassified since many of these reports contain very precise, detailed information on those first two atomic bombs.
His findings are available in a self-published book he continuously updates, Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man.
I wish I had a badass hobby like that.
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