美国国家公共电台 NPR North Korea Designed A Nuke. So Did This Truck Driver

 

NOEL KING, HOST:

This year, deep inside a mountain, North Korea detonated a giant nuclear bomb. It also launched missiles. And so for the first time since the Cold War ended, a lot of us ordinary Americans have started thinking about nuclear weapons. But one American, a big rig trucker, has been thinking about these weapons for decades, and he can't stop. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel has the story of his obsession¹ with the bomb and what it can tell us about North Korea.

GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE²: John Coster-Mullen is 71 years old and lives in Milwaukee. He works for a major trucking firm delivering merchandise to big-box stores.

JOHN COSTER-MULLEN: Twelve hours a night, five days one week and six days the next.

BRUMFIEL: But for the past 24 years, Coster-Mullen has had an extraordinary hobby. He has carefully recreated detailed³ designs of America's very first nuclear weapons - Little Boy, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, and Fat Man, the one that fell on Nagasaki. It all began in 1993 with a scheme to make a little money.

COSTER-MULLEN: The 50th anniversary was coming up on the bombs, and maybe I could make little replicas⁴ of the bombs and sell them.

BRUMFIEL: To him, it made sense. He'd grown up at the dawn of the atomic age and loved making models. He figured some like-minded baby boomer might buy them. Now, some companies were already making models of the bombs, but Coster-Mullen noticed their versions looked off. Maybe the tailfins were wrong or something like that. He thought he could do better.

COSTER-MULLEN: If you're going to do it, do it real, and I'm a perfectionist. I want everything where it should be.

BRUMFIEL: So to make his models, he drove 1,300 miles to the birthplace of the atomic bombs - Los Alamos, N.M. The museum there has accurate, full-scale replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man he could work from. As he designed his models, he decided⁵ he'd write a little brochure to go with them.

COSTER-MULLEN: And the brochure turned into a 431-page book.

BRUMFIEL: Coster-Mullen never sold a single model, but he's been adding to his bomb brochure ever since, building up what are basically complete specs on America's first nuclear weapons. He's traveled the country and the world to glean⁶ all sorts of supposedly secret details.

COSTER-MULLEN: Nobody leaked anything to me. I found all this information was hiding in plain sight.

BRUMFIEL: Like the time he went to a lecture by someone who'd worked on the development of the bombs and the guy had the special commemorative paperweight.

COSTER-MULLEN: It turned out that paperweight, that souvenir, the mold they poured the plastic in, it was the same mold they poured the plutonium into to make the cores.

BRUMFIEL: The small, nuclear cores at the center of the Fat Man-type bombs. So Coster-Mullen ran up after the lecture, made a few quick measurements and got what was once highly classified information. He also spends a lot of time poring over declassified⁷ photographs and documents and thinking about how the pieces they describe fit together.

COSTER-MULLEN: I've had a lot of those aha moments where it suddenly hits you. And when I'm driving at night, I've had a lot of these where it flashes in your head and you're like, oh, oh, oh, oh, my.

BRUMFIEL: Coster-Mullen lives for those aha moments, and they've added up to a very complete diagram of each bomb. I ask him to show me his design for Fat Man.

COSTER-MULLEN: I used to know the page numbers, but when you keep adding stuff, the page numbers get moved around. OK, there we go.

BRUMFIEL: Coster-Mullen drew it himself. The level of detail is incredible.

COSTER-MULLEN: The central core is the 3.5, 3.6-inch diameter plutonium core. That's what they were trying to compress.

BRUMFIEL: Coster-Mullen sells his book on Amazon. I tried to contact several former nuclear weapons designers about his work. None of them wanted to comment publicly on it. But Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, says conversations he's had suggests the designs are reasonably close to the real thing.

JEFFREY LEWIS: I'm not in a position to judge, but I observe that people who are seem to take them seriously, and some of those people are alarmed.

BRUMFIEL: But Lewis has a little bit of a different take on this. He says Coster-Mullen's odyssey⁸ shows nuclear weapons just aren't that hard.

LEWIS: If a truck driver from Milwaukee can roughly replicate⁹ one, then that tells you that there is nothing mysterious about them.

BRUMFIEL: The only hard part is getting the uranium or plutonium to fuel the bomb, which brings us back to North Korea. It has both. Earlier this year, it conducted a massive nuclear test of a powerful weapon at least 10 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb. That led to a lot of talk about stopping North Korea from advancing its technology. But Lewis says that may not be possible.

LEWIS: I think we watch too many superhero movies. We imagine that we can physically¹⁰ prevent people from doing this, but it is so easy.

BRUMFIEL: That's why Lewis says the only way to halt North Korea's progress may be to somehow convince them that it's in their best interest to stop it themselves. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF APPALACHES' "PISOECOURSE")

1 obsession   

n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感)

参考例句：

• I was suffering from obsession that my career would be ended.那时的我陷入了我的事业有可能就此终止的困扰当中。
• She would try to forget her obsession with Christopher.她会努力忘记对克里斯托弗的迷恋。

2 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

3 detailed   

adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的

参考例句：

• He had made a detailed study of the terrain.他对地形作了缜密的研究。
• A detailed list of our publications is available on request.我们的出版物有一份详细的目录备索。

4 replicas   

n.复制品( replica的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• His hobby is building replicas of cars. 他的爱好是制作汽车的复制品。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The replicas are made by using a thin film of fusible alloy on a stiffening platen. 复制是用附着在加强托板上的可熔合金薄膜实现的。 来自辞典例句

5 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

6 glean   

v.收集(消息、资料、情报等)

参考例句：

• The little information that we could glean about them was largely contradictory.我们能够收集到的有关它们的少量信息大部分是自相矛盾的。
• From what I was able to glean,it appears they don't intend to take any action yet.根据我所收集到的资料分析，他们看来还不打算采取任何行动。

7 declassified   

adj.解密的v.对（机密文件等）销密( declassify的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Thousands of classified documents have now been declassified. 数以千计的保密文件现在被解密了。
• The software used for Siemens S7-300 encryption logic block declassified. 此软件用于对西门子S7-300加密逻辑块解密。

8 odyssey   

n.长途冒险旅行；一连串的冒险

参考例句：

• The march to Travnik was the final stretch of a 16-hour odyssey.去特拉夫尼克的这段路是长达16小时艰险旅行的最后一程。
• His odyssey of passion, friendship,love,and revenge was now finished.他的热情、友谊、爱情和复仇的漫长历程，到此结束了。

9 replicate   

v.折叠，复制，模写；n.同样的样品；adj.转折的

参考例句：

• The DNA of chromatin must replicate before cell division.染色质DNA在细胞分裂之前必须复制。
• It is also easy to replicate,as the next subsection explains.就像下一个小节详细说明的那样，它还可以被轻易的复制。

10 physically   

adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律

参考例句：

• He was out of sorts physically,as well as disordered mentally.他浑身不舒服，心绪也很乱。
• Every time I think about it I feel physically sick.一想起那件事我就感到极恶心。