Word: mcphee
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Practically on the day this chilling book reached the public, someone with religious or political convictions detonated four car bombs in Dublin and a town to the north, killing 28 people. The event gave special interest to Author McPhee's thesis, which is that right now one fairly skilled technician, using easily obtainable equipment and information, and easily stolen uranium 235 or plutonium 239, could make a nuclear fission bomb. The bomb certainly would be small enough to fit into a Volkswagen, and perhaps into a golf...
Like a number of people now concerned with the problem (TIME, May 13), McPhee assumes that sooner or later someone will do it and will hold a city, or cities, at ransom. The motive might be idealism or simple criminality. Whatever his (or their) reasons, McPhee notes, the bomb makers would have to establish credibility and so presumably would make two bombs. The first would be set off as a free sample, and the second would be offered at a price...
...McPhee is not a physicist but a journalist, one of the very best now writing, who specializes in the long, reportorial essay. He has written books about such things as oranges, tennis, ecology, an unlikely tract of New Jersey outback called the Pine Barrens and a group of men who tried to reinvent the zeppelin. Like all journalists dealing with science, McPhee is tethered by limitations in his readers' knowledge and imagination...
Writing about nuclear physics and the creative process of a bomb maker for an audience that does not understand mathematics, moreover, is a bit like writing music criticism for the deaf. McPhee manages very well, using the life and thought of Theoretical Physicist Ted Taylor as a way into the subject. The reader, balancing his head carefully so that the neutrons won't spill out, is led an enormous distance, to the point where a good many of Taylor's calculations seem understandable...
Much later we see Taylor middleaged, a figure of high reputation among his colleagues, now disaffected with bomb making and no longer at work as a nuclear physicist. He directs an ecological-research firm. He and McPhee travel about the country. He shows the author unguarded trucks rumbling down rural highways, loaded with weapons-grade uranium. They see manufacturing plants where enough fissionable material to blow up Manhattan could be stolen by one armed and determined man, or carried off bit by bit, undetected, by one unarmed employee...