The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 6 | Issue 12 | Article ID 3000 | Dec 01, 2008

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Atomic John: The Bomb as Fetish

Lawrence S. Wittner, D Samuels

Atomic John: The Bomb as Fetish

Lawrence S. Wittner and DavidSamuels

The Bomb as Fetish

Introduction by Lawrence S. Wittner

"Atomic John," an intriguing article thatappeared in the New Yorker onDecember 15, 2008, is particularlyremarkable for what it reveals about theinability of some Americans to confrontthe consequences of the U.S. atomicbombing of Japan.

On the surface, it is the story of JohnCoster-Mullen, a 61-year-old "truckdriver" from Waukesha, Wisconsin, who,through years of painstaking effort, hassucceeded better than the ostensibleexperts have in constructing a precisemodel of the weapon that annihilatedHiroshima. This is a formidableintellectual achievement, and the authorof the article, David Samuels, emphasizesthis fact. Moreover, Coster-Mullen hasmade available his findings about thebomb's technology in a self-publishedbook and on the Internet.

Actually, however, as one plunges intothe article, one discovers that Coster-Mullen is not quite the simple trucker

mentioned in the article's subtitle. Indeed, he previously had worked as acommercial photographer and in otherjobs that provided him with considerableskill in visual measurement, as well astechnical knowledge.

And stranger currents swirl below thestory line, especially Coster-Mullen'sobsession with producing a precisephysical model of the atomic bomb. AsSamuels shows us, Coster-Mullen has notonly devoted many years of his life tostudying the details of the weapons usedto destroy two Japanese cities, but isabsolutely obsessed with them. Hemaintains extensive atomic bombmemorabilia and is constantly on thelookout for more. In addition, duringlengthy travels with Samuels across thecountry to nuclear-related sites, he talkedobsessively, non-stop, about theconstruction of atomic bombs.

This fanatical concern with what are,after all, no more than material objectscharacterizes Coster-Mullen's approachand, in time, also overwhelmed Samuels,who admits to finding Coster-Mullen'swork "strangely seductive." Writing withadmiration of the trucker, Samuelsdeclares that Coster-Mullen's goal "issimply to present readers with accurateinformation about the past." He is one of"the small and shrinking number of

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people who engage in painstaking,firsthand research in order to separatethe truth from the body of supposedfacts, and who keep the rest of ushonest."

Yet what is the most significant "truth"about the atomic bomb? The reality isthat Coster-Mullen informs us aboutminutiae—the technical features of theoriginal atomic bomb—rather than aboutfar larger and more meaningful issues,such as why the Bomb was used, what itdid to the people of Japan, and how itsdevelopment and use triggered thenuclear arms race since 1945.

Nagasaki in ruins following theatomic bombing

Indeed, when it comes to these matters,he is remarkably ignorant, repeatingshallow clichés. As the two men gaze atCoster-Mullen's model of the Hiroshimabomb, on display at Wendover Air ForceBase, there is a revealing moment. According to Samuels:

I asked him if there wasn't

something obscene about anexhibit that commemoratesthe incineration of ninetythousand civilians, who wereamong the last victims of awar that was pretty muchover. "Well, there was noindication that they weregoing to surrender," Coster-Mullen said. He added thatmost of the fifty million peoplewho died in the Second WorldWar were civilians.

A rough analogy would be someonedevoting much of his life to ascertainingthe exact construction of the crematoriaat the Auschwitz concentration campwho, when asked about the causes andconsequences of the Nazi Holocaust,replied: "The Jews caused a lot of troublein Europe. Also, most of the people whodied during World War II weren't Jewish."

Why, then, is Coster-Mullen—havingskirted all the big issues posed by theatomic bomb—fascinated by what couldbe considered nuclear trivia? Perhaps hetakes satisfaction in one-upping thesupposed exper t s and de f y inggovernment attempts to maintain secrecyon the atomic bomb's features, by doingbetter than anyone else has in unearthingthe details of its construction. Certainlythis is the dominant theme of the article,which highlights how an allegedly simpleworker—one who never graduated fromcollege—has uncovered, single-handedly,the hidden secrets of the atomic bomb.

One explanation that Samuels does not

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explore is that Coster-Mullen—like manyAmericans—is psychologically incapableof facing the horror that his countryunleashed on Japan and the potentiallyfatal nuclear arms race that it unleashedon the world. Although he recognizes theimportance of the bomb, he cannotconfront the reasons for that importance,for to do so would be painful.

Fire. Hiroshima mural by MarukiToshi and Maruki Iri

This avoidance of a painful reality is alsoimplicit in the publication of this article. After all, in a very extensive report, it iscurious that Samuels only once—asquoted above—raises a larger issuepertaining to the bomb: its massdestruction of civilians in a war that wasvirtually over. And what should one sayof the New Yorker, which in 1946 did somuch to expand popular consciousness ofnuclear war by publishing John Hersey's

powerful "Hiroshima" and today hasnarrowed the scope of its concern fromthe victims of the bomb and a world ofnuclear weapons to covering the buildingof a small-scale model of the bomb?

In the midst of this chilling evasion of thebroad issues raised by nuclear weapons,it is worth remembering that millions ofpeople—including many Americans—havegone beyond fetishizing the bomb toaddressing in word and deed moreprofound issues. Indeed, recognizing thenuclear catastrophe of the past, theyhave formed powerful peace anddisarmament organizations, educatedtheir societies on nuclear dangers,championed nuclear arms control anddisarmament treaties, and ferventlyopposed any repetition of the nightmarethat engulfed the people of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki. As a result, they played amajor role in curbing the nuclear armsrace and preventing nuclear war. Inmany ways, their story represents theother side of the coin. It is certainlymore reassuring than the eerie obsessionwith atomic bomb technology revealed bythis article.

Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor ofHistory at the State University of NewYork/Albany and the author of the award-winning trilogy, The Struggle Against theBomb (Stanford University Press).

Atomic John: A truck driver uncoverssecrets about the first nuclear bombs.(http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels?yrail)

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David Samuels

John Coster-Mullen conducted a decade of researchto build the first accurate replica of the Hiroshima

bomb.

The single, blinding release of pure energy overHiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, marked astartling and permanent break with our priorunderstandings of the visible world. Yet formore than sixty years the technology behindthe explosion has remained a state secret. TheUnited States government has never divulgedthe engineering specifications of the firstatomic bombs, not even after other countrieshave produced generations of ever morepowerful nuclear weapons. In the decadessince the Second World War, dozens ofhistorians have attempted to divine the precisemechanics of the Hiroshima bomb, nicknamedLittle Boy, and of the bomb that fell three dayslater on Nagasaki, known as Fat Man. The mostprominent is Richard Rhodes, who won a

Pulitzer Prize, in 1988, for his dazzling andmeticulous book “The Making of the AtomicBomb.” But the most accurate account of thebomb’s inner workings—an unnervinglydetailed reconstruction, based on oldphotographs and documents—has been writtenby a sixty-one-year-old truck driver fromWaukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mul len, who was once a commercia lphotographer, and has never received a collegedegree.

I first came across Coster-Mullen’s name inJanuary of 2004, after I attended an exhibit bythe artist Jim Sanborn, at the Corcoran Galleryof Art, in Washington, D.C. The show, called“Critical Assembly,” included what appeared tobe spookily exact replicas of the interiormechanism of the first atomic bomb, whichSanborn had manufactured according toCoster-Mullen’s specifications. A year later, Iread an article in the Bulletin of the AtomicScientists that mentioned a six-hundred-miletrip Coster-Mullen had taken across theMidwest with a full-scale model of theHiroshima bomb in the back of a Penske rentaltruck. He had built the replica with the help ofhis son, Jason, in his garage, basing it, in part,on his analysis of sixty-year-old screws, bolts,and fragments of machined steel that had beenstored in rural basements and attics.

The mention of Coster-Mullen’s journey led meback to the November/December, 2004, issueof the Bulletin, which included a review of abook by Coster-Mullen titled “Atom Bombs: TheTop Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and FatMan.” The review, written by the eminentatomic historian Robert S. Norris, began, “Formany years, Coster-Mullen has been printinghis manuscript at Kinko’s (adding to andrevising it along the way) and selling spiral-bound copies at conferences or over theInternet.” Norris clearly considered Coster-Mullen’s understanding of the bomb superior tohis own. It was known that Little Boy and FatMan brought together two masses of fissile

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material inside a bomb casing, forming acritical mass that set off a nuclear explosion.Little Boy shot one mass of highly enricheduranium into the other with a gunlikemechanism; Fat Man used explosives tosqueeze together two hemispheres ofplutonium. But the exact details of how thesedevices worked were unknown. Norris said ofCoster-Mullen’s work, “Nothing else in theManhattan Project literature comes close to hisexacting breakdown of the bomb’s parts.Coster-Mullen describes the size, weight, andcompos i t ion o f many o f L i t t le Boy ’scomponents, including the nose section and itstarget case; the uranium-235 target rings andtamper; the arming and fuzing system; theforged steel 6.5-inch-in-diameter gun barrelthrough which the uranium-235 projectile wasfired at the target rings; and the tail section—tocite just a few.”

My own copy of “Atom Bombs” soon arrived inthe mail, along with a sheet of testimonialsfrom Harold Agnew, the former director of theLos Alamos National Laboratory, who wasaboard the Enola Gay when it annihilatedHiroshima (a “most amazing document”); PhilipMorrison, one of the physicists who helpedinvent the bomb (“You have done a remarkablejob”); and Paul Tibbets, the commander andpilot of the Enola Gay (“I was very muchimpressed”). “Atom Bombs” consists of denselyinterlocking sentences, nearly all of whichcontain dimensional information thatcontradicts the assertions of previousauthorities. “A circular steel plate waspositioned inside the 17.0"-diameter tailcylinder at the front of the tail tube andanother towards the rear of the tube,” Coster-Mullen writes. “These allowed the tail to be slidover the 10.5"-diameter gun tube duringassembly. The forward plate was positioned26.5" in front of the aft plate and was welded tothe front of the tail tube.”

Col. Paul W. Tibbets, the commander and pilot of theEnola Gay

Though the book’s speci f ic i ty aboutdimensions, shapes, and materials was mind-numbing, the accumulation of detail wasstrangely seductive. As Coster-Mullendescribed how the different parts of theHiroshima and Nagasaki bombs fit together, Ifelt that I could practically assemble an atomicweapon myself.

The text was followed by more than a hundredpages of declassified photographs extractedfrom half a dozen government archives, whichshowed the weapons at various stages ofcompletion—surrounded by scientists in NewMexico or by tanned, shirtless crew memberson Tinian Island, in the Western Pacific, justbefore the bombs were dropped. Coster-Mullen’s book concluded with thirty-five pagesof end notes, including a hilariously involveddiscussion of the textural differences in thegold foil used to separate the plutoniumhemispheres for the first atomic bomb, Trinity

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(dimpled), and the Nagasaki bomb (flat).

A page from Coster-Mullen's sketchbook

Coster-Mullen sees his project as a divertingmental challenge—not unlike a crosswordpuzzle—whose goal is simply to present readerswith accurate information about the past. “Thisis nuclear archeology,” he told me, in a late-night phone call. “It’s like any other kind ofarcheology.” Though the government does notmake a practice of providing Coster-Mullenwith timely responses to his technical inquiries,no official has actively discouraged him frompursuing his research. After a period of mildequivocation, he decided to publish all thedetails he had uncovered about the mechanicsand production of the bomb, even though thesubject remains classified. “I was acting like aclassification officer,” he recalls. “‘I can havethe truth and you can’t.’ Who am I to say that?”

Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki

Among other things, Coster-Mullen’s bookmakes clear that our belief in the secrecy of thebomb is a theological construct, adopted in nosmall part to shield ourselves from the idea thatsomeone might use an atomic bomb against us.Surely, hostile powers could easily obtain thekind of information that Coster-Mullen hasacquired, however painstakingly, in his sparetime. Any nation that can master the challengesof the atomic-fuel cycle and produce a criticalmass of uranium or plutonium, as Iran isreported to be on the verge of doing, wouldhave little difficulty in producing a workablebomb. Given a sufficient quantity of highlyenriched uranium, a small number of engineersworking for a terrorist group like Al Qaeda orHezbollah could easily assemble a homemadenuclear device.

I recently wrote to Coster-Mullen andsuggested that we take a trip across thecountry to visit his Little Boy replica, which isc u r r e n t l y h o u s e d a t W e n d o v e r , a

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decommissioned Air Force base in Utah. Aftersome negotiation, we agreed to ride togetheron his late-night delivery route betweenWaukesha and Chicago. We would then drive toWendover. Along the way, he would explain theinner workings of the first atomic bombs, and Iwould learn how he got it right and the expertsgot it wrong.

Coster-Mullen and I met in the darkenedparking lot of a regional distribution center fora big-box retailer, some ten miles outsideWaukesha. Dressed in Lee jeans and a tan shirtwith the J. B. Hunt logo, he had titanium-frameglasses, blue-gray eyes, and a full head ofsilvery hair. The distribution center was thesize of seven or eight football fields; fansroaring overhead and an enormous conveyorbelt drowned out the beeps of cabs backing upto trailers. Coster-Mullen picked up his sheetfor the night, which involved stops at Store1950, in Streamwood, Illinois, and Store 1889,in downtown Chicago. He was to drop off acontainer filled with lawn furniture inStreamwood, and haul back “sweep”merchandise—cardboard boxes, defectiveitems, coat hangers—from Chicago. We walkedoutside and hooked up Coster-Mullen’s truck totrailer No. 537427, with a solid click. It wasseven o’clock on a Sunday night. He calmlyrecited a safety checklist (“My lights are on, myflashers are on”) and we set off.

The Hiroshima combat unit in one of the Tinianassembly buildings.

Over the years, Coster-Mullen told me, he hadheld nearly a dozen jobs, including working atcamera stores in and around Milwaukee; doinginventory control for the Beloit Corporation,which manufactured paper-making equipment;taking photographs of industrial equipment forTrane, the heating and air-conditioningcompany, and then for Mercury Marine, whichmakes high-quality engines for boats; workingas a studio photographer for Pohlman Studios,in Mi lwaukee ; and runn ing h i s ownphotography business. These jobs had providedhim with the skills, he says, that helped himsolve the puzzle of the bomb. I asked him howhe wound up driving a truck. “They are alwayshiring,” he said. “I figured if people with thebrains of a squirrel could drive a truck, maybe Icould drive a truck.”

The highway cut through scrubland, and bynightfall Coster-Mullen was driving past OldWorld Wisconsin, a tourist attraction thatfeatures restorations of prairie homesteads.Making long cross-country drives, Coster-Mullen said, had given him plenty of time toreëxamine the three-dimensional diagram ofthe bomb that he keeps in his head, like aBuddhist monk contemplating the Karmicwheel. His truck routes also made it easy forhim to maintain connections with sources.Twelve years ago, Coster-Mullen pulled into aWal-Mart parking lot in North Carolina and gotinto the car of a retired machinist in his lateseventies, who showed him photographs ofmetal pieces that he had fashioned for theTrinity bomb, which was set off in the desertoutside Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July,1945. Coster-Mullen said that machinists oftenhid the fragments in their shoes and pantscuffs, in order to have something to show theirgrandchildren. Two years after meeting themachinist, in 1998, Coster-Mullen, whiledriving through Nebraska with three cars infront of him, figured out the exact shape andweight of the pieces of uranium inside Little

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Boy. “I’m sitting there with my pocketcalculator, going, ‘If the core had this diameter,and the length is this, what’s the volume?’ ” herecalled. “I went, ‘That’s it!’ And then I got onthe horn—urh-urh.”

Arriving at the drop-off point in Streamwood,we unhooked the truck’s electric and air lines,then turned the crank on the landing gear fortytimes. We picked up another container, gotback in the truck, and headed south, towardChicago. At four in the morning, we passed theSears Tower. Coster-Mullen gingerly navigatedthe pillars inside an indoor parking garage andpulled up to the loading dock.

The trailer, which contained thirty-onethousand pounds of FAK—“freight of allkinds”—wasn’t ready yet, so we checked outthe bales of sweep merchandise: crushed boxesof cookies, dented cans, ripped jeans. Finally,we hooked up the trailer and hit the road. Aswe headed north, Coster-Mullen explained tome the likely blast effects of a Hiroshima-sizenuclear device exploding in a container truck indowntown Chicago. He said, “All you need todo is take two subcritical masses of uraniumand smash them into each other to form acritical mass. Neutrons strike the heavyuranium nucleus, which splits, releasing atremendous jolt of energy along with two ormore neutrons, which split more nuclei, settingoff a chain reaction that grows and grows andfinally manifests itself as a huge fireball over apopulated area, blinding, asphyxiating,incinerating, or crushing every living beingwithin a five-mile radius.” As he elaborated onthe scenario, the sun began to rise, and I fellasleep with my face against the window.

We arrived at Coster-Mullen’s home, inWaukesha, around eight o’clock that morning.He lives in a ranch house on a cul-de-sac in apleasant subdivision. His wife, Mary, is aretired social worker who spends most of hertime reading and knitting. They have twochildren together, and Coster-Mullen has a

third from a previous marriage. Asters, black-eyed Susans, and coral bells blossomedbeneath the trees in the back yard. Coster-Mullen, in anticipation of my visit, had arrayedhis kitchen with some of his atom-bombmemorabilia, including a roof tile from thehypocenter of the Hiroshima blast, which hepurchased for eighty-nine dollars from a formermember of the U.S. radiation-survey team. Healso owns a brick of graphite from EnricoFermi’s lab at the University of Chicago—thesite of the first reactor pile—which he wasgiven by two physicists who were fans of hisbook; a small marine fossil that was underneaththe Trinity bomb when it exploded in the NewMexico desert, which Coster-Mullen dug out ofthe ground himself during a visit to the site;silicone molds of the detonator for the Trinitybomb; a chunk of uranium; and a sphere ofberyllium, a component of modern atomicbombs.

He handed me a leaflet that had been droppedover Japan by B-29 bombers in late July, 1945.“Attention Japanese People,” the leaflet says.“In the next few days, four (or more) of thecities named on the reverse side will bedestroyed by American bombs. These citiescontain military installations and workshops orfactories that produce military goods. We aredetermined to destroy all of the tools of themilitary clique.”

A leaflet dropped over Japan

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On the kitchen counter sat somethingseemingly unconnected to atomic weapons: ahobbyist’s model of the Joan of Arc chapel, onthe campus of Marquette University, inMilwaukee. In fact, Coster-Mullen told me, themodel, which he completed in 1993, had helpedspark his obsession with building his ownbomb. He had built the model in the hope oflaunching a business. Marquette alumni andother visitors, he had figured, would eagerlybuy replicas of the chapel and display them intheir homes. Constructing the model wasdifficult, he recalled: “I was using dental picksand surgical 3-D glasses and I learned how tocarve little eyes in the wood benches.” Likemost of his business ideas, before and since,the project showed both a fanatical devotion todetail and a hazy grasp of what ordinaryconsumers might pay for. He placed the chapelmodels in local gift shops on consignment, butfew sold. After this failure, Coster-Mullendecided to make replicas of something withwider commercial appeal.

In December, 1993, he persuaded his son,Jason, who was then seventeen, to accompanyhim on a road trip to the National AtomicMuseum, in Albuquerque, where Coster-Mullencould examine the empty ballistic casing of anatomic bomb at first hand and make sketchesthat he could use to build an accurate scalemodel. After driving two thousand miles to themuseum, he was distressed to find that theatomic-weapons area was c losed forrenovation. He protested until his contact atthe museum finally appeared and let them in.He and Jason spent hours measuring the bombcasings on display. (In the early nineties, afterthe fall of the Soviet Union, no one wasparticularly disturbed by the sight of a fatherand son poking measuring tape inside thecasings of fifty-year-old bombs.) The Coster-Mullens were soon measuring weapons casingsaround the country, including at the Wright-Patterson base, in Ohio; the West PointMuseum, in the Hudson Valley; and theSmithsonian, in Washington, D.C. They also

saw the Fat Man display at the BradburyScience Museum, in Los Alamos.

During these and other excursions, Coster-Mul len d iscovered that much of thedimensional information about the bombs inhistory books was wrong. “Rhodes and otherssaid that Little Boy is twenty-nine inches indiameter—but it’s not, it’s twenty-eight,” hesaid, in the friendly, matter-of-fact tone he usesto soften the force of his obsession. Wonderingwhat other errors the historians had made, hebegan to attend reunions of the 509thComposite Group, the military unit thatdropped the bombs. He went to his firstreunion in 1994, in Chicago. Before thegathering, he wrote a draft of a pamphlet aboutthe bomb and sent it to Frederick Ashworth, anaval commander who was in charge of the FatMan weapon. “The Monday of the reunionweek, I get this letter back from AdmiralAshworth, who, justifiably, took me to task,”Coster-Mullen recalls. “He said, ‘Either treatthis subject with the seriousness it deserves ordrop it.’ So I chose the former.”

Coster-Mullen spent the next ten years of hislife mastering a body of recondite technicaldata. He extracted photographs fromgovernment archives and scrutinized them witha magnifying glass; he interviewed one retiredmachinist after another, as well as scientistsand engineers. Researching the bomb providedCoster-Mullen with an outlet for a sensibilitythat might have been equally at homecollecting tropical butterflies or double-printstamps. To suggest that Coster-Mullen is agarden-variety classification freak, however, islike comparing a high-school trumpet player toMiles Davis. Driven by his desire to solve agreat puzzle, he is personally affronted byrecycled information and secondary sourcing,which often leads him to express contempt forpeople who are lazier than he is—a categorythat includes virtually everyone.

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An early version of Coster-Mullen’s rendering ofLittle Boy’s internal components

The first edition of “Atom Bombs” wascompleted in 2003. With the publication of thebook, which has since undergone severalhundred revisions, Coster-Mullen became aleading member of the loosely organizedscholarly fraternity dedicated to challengingthe ethic of secrecy behind the atomic securitystate. Its dozen or so members includedRichard Rhodes; Chuck Hansen, a computerprogrammer whose Freedom of Information Actrequests helped him assemble “The Swords ofArmageddon,” a twenty-nine-hundred-page,seven-volume archive of documentaryinformation about the U.S. nuclear arsenal;Howard Morland, who published the firstdetailed sketch of a thermonuclear weapon, inThe Progressive, in 1979; and Carey Sublette, aprogrammer in California, who has posted awealth of data about atomic weapons on theInternet.

Coster-Mullen fulfills orders for “AtomicBombs” himself, by running off copies and thenmailing them. (The book is available throughAmazon, and costs $49.95.) According to arecent log of purchase information, “AtomicBombs” is sought after mainly by people whosee-mail addresses identify them as members of

the nation’s secret nuclear archipelago: LANL,LLNL, SNL, ORNL, ANL, Pantex, Fermilab, theHanford and Savannah River nuclear plants,the F.B.I.

“Thanks again for the great book,” a nuclearworker named Lee recently wrote to Coster-Mullen. “As soon as I finish it, my son, who’s onthe 61 program”—maintaining the stockpile ofvariants of the original B-61 nuclearbombs—“will be reading it, probably in one ofthe assembly bays.”

Many customers seem to enjoy thumbing theirnoses at U.S. security officials, who remaindetermined to keep the bomb’s precisetechnical specifications a mystery. HaroldAgnew, the former director of Los Alamos,recently wrote to Coster-Mullen, “The realproblem with the security people is that theyare basically ignorant and maybe just plainstupid. I guess if they just say no to everythingthey believe they have job security and won’tget into trouble with their equally stupidbosses.” Agnew added that he had suggested tosecurity officials at Los Alamos that they inviteCoster-Mullen to give a talk on how he did hisresearch—“so in the future if there really issomething they want to keep close, they mighthave a clearer idea as to how to do it.”

In March, 2007, after an extended debatewithin the community of civilian nuclearobsessives, Coster-Mullen’s revisionistdiagrams of Little Boy and the core of the FatMan bomb were posted on Wikipedia. Accurateinformation about how a simple nuclear bombis made, and how it works, is now available toanyone with Internet access. “Before 9/11, Ifound our government’s emphasis on secrecyabhorrent,” Richard Rhodes told me. “I find iteven more so now.” Rhodes considers absurdthe idea that a foreign government or terroristmight build a bomb based on Coster-Mullen’sdiagrams. “Everyone who is sufficientlysophisticated in these matters hardly needs thehelp of us poor souls, who aren’t even

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scientists,” he said. Rhodes said of the U.S.government’s classification efforts, “The pointis to keep the bombs out of sight, to make usfeel that the bombs aren’t real, and that isJohn’s real contribution. The notion that we aresafer because we have all these bombs tuckedaway is a huge fraud.”

Coster-Mullen is a man of rigid preferences. Heloves Diet Coke, but under no circumstanceswill he drink Diet Pepsi, which he describes ashaving a sugary, chemical aftertaste thatmakes him feel nauseated. Even a teasingmention of Diet Pepsi can set off a rant that willmomentarily eclipse talk of the bomb. Othersubjects capable of replacing the bomb in hismind for short periods of time are his wife andchildren; the stupidity of Christian beliefs; thestupidity of religion in general; the prevailingetiquette at truck stops; and stories aboutrescued cats. The longest he has ever gone inmy company without mentioning the atomicbomb is thirty-seven minutes, a record heachieved on a particularly beautiful stretch ofroad running through the sun-baked canyonseast of Salt Lake City. To say that Coster-Mullen actually went that long withoutspeaking about the atomic bomb is anexaggeration, as he referred to nuclearweapons twice in passing, and because he wasaware that I was timing him with a stopwatch.

Coster-Mullen had agreed to drive us fromWaukesha to Wendover, while I sat in thepassenger seat of my rental car and askedquestions. (I’m a lousy driver.) Researchmaterials shared the back seat with a smallcooler that plugged into the dashboardcigarette lighter and contained cheese, salami,and four twenty-ounce bottles of Diet Coke,which Coster-Mullen consumes at the rate ofone per hour. When he finished a bottle, hetossed it onto the back seat. After two or threeempties accumulated, he refilled them withsoda from a two-litre mother-ship bottle that hekept in a shopping bag on the floor.

Soon after we had begun the car trip, wepassed the industrial city of Beloit, Wisconsin.As a young photographer on the Beloit DailyNews, in 1973, he was responsible for onefront-page picture and five inside photos perday. He spent hours in the darkroom eachweek, and the knowledge that he gained aboutthe technical side of photography provedindispensable when he began researching hisbook, and subjecting declassified photographsfrom government archives to detailed analysis.

Coster-Mullen’s techniques for assessing thesize and nature of objects depicted inphotographs are familiar to photo editors,intelligence analysts, and others whose job is toglean detailed information from images, butthey were new to the community of civilianatomic researchers. His first such intimateexamination was of a famous photograph fromJuly 15, 1945, of the scientists Herb Lehr andHarry Daghlian lugging a wooden cratecontaining a portion of the Trinity device’s“physics package”—the plutonium part—to acar parked outside the McDonald Ranch House,a test site in New Mexico. A retired mastermachinist at Los Alamos, whom Coster-Mulleninterviewed, had once measured the plug of FatMan’s physics package, and recalled that it waseleven or twelve inches long, and had beeninserted into an aluminum sphere that was atleast two feet in diameter. If Coster-Mullencould figure out the size of the box in thepicture, he reasoned, he could determine themaximum size of the object inside. “They’rebacking around the corner of that open door,”he noted, gesturing at a copy of the photographthat I held on my lap as we drove throughDixon, Illinois—Ronald Reagan’s home town.“The height of the box is in line with the frontedge of the door.”

There were distinctive-looking suicide doors onthe vehicle, which made him think that hecould identify the model, so he took thephotograph to an antique-car dealer south ofMilwaukee. Together, they examined the

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dealer’s collection of Clymer manuals, whichcontain mechanical specifications for majorAmerican cars. American manufacturersstopped building cars for civilians after the1942 model year and didn’t resume makingthem until the 1946 model year, which made iteasy to identify the car in the McDonald RanchHouse photo as a 1942 Plymouth.

A few weeks later, Coster-Mullen was drivingwith his wife past an antique-auto show, wherehe found two 1942 Plymouths. “I showed thephotograph and I said, ‘I’d like to measure theheight of that door,’ ” he recalled. “Thephotographer’s taking that with a normalcamera lens, and he’s back about twenty feetfrom the car, so you wouldn’t get anyforeshortening. So I measure the height andapplied proportional measuring. A is to B as Cis to D. And it turned out that that box was onlyabout ten and a half inches long. So, obviously,something eleven or twelve inches longcouldn’t even fit in that box.”

Later, when we took a break at a truck stop inIowa, he told me about another early discovery:a declassified report about the death of HarryDaghlian, who died of radiation poisoning atLos Alamos after he dropped a block oftungsten carbide onto a bomb assemblycontaining a plutonium sphere, on August 21,1945. The report contained a photograph inwhich another physicist recreated Daghlian’saccident. A ruler was helpfully positioned on atungsten block, which allowed Coster-Mullen todetermine that the plutonium sphere, whichwas identical to those used in the first atomicbomb, was 3.62 inches in diameter. All it took,he said, was a set of digital calipers and a littlehigh-school geometry.

A few hours after leaving the truck stop, wepassed by a town in Iowa called Stuart—adeduction I made upon seeing a huge whitewindmill with the word “STUART” paintedvertically on its base. A road sign informed usthat Omaha was ninety-three miles to the west.

“That beryllium sphere that you showed meyesterday,” I said. “Where did that come from?”

“eBay!” Coster-Mullen replied. “It cost aboutthirty bucks. I bought it because it was roughlythe same size as one of those polonium-beryllium initiators they used in Fat Man.”Polonium is also readily available on theInternet, he said. He said that it was possible,though not easy, for a rogue figure to acquirematerial for an atomic weapon. “They proved ina test that you can use reactor-grade plutoniumin a bomb,” he said. “I believe it took place inthe seventies or eighties, at a Nevada test site.Supposedly, thorium can be used to makeuranium. Well, thorium was in camper gaslanterns. Oh, you’d have to have quite a few.Americium, which is the key element in smokedetectors, is supposedly a fissile material. But itwould probably be suspicious, because you’dneed to order about a million smoke detectorsto extract enough material.”

At midmorning, we reached the outskirts ofOmaha, where we visited the Strategic Air andSpace Museum, whose grounds are marked bya towering Atlas D ballistic missile. Energizedby forty ounces of Diet Coke, Coster-Mullenignored the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane hangingover the entrance to the museum and headedstraight to the front desk, where he corralled aretired armed-services veteran who wasvolunteering his time. Smooth jazz played inthe background.

“Do you have any casings of Little Boy or FatMan?” he asked.

No, the veteran said.

By the time we left the museum, the sky hadgone dark and storm clouds were on thehorizon. As Coster-Mullen drove, I examined ascale drawing of Little Boy that he had begundrafting in 1995. When he had visited theBradbury Science Museum earlier that year, henoticed that a diagram of the exterior of thebomb had been mislabelled; it placed a contact

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fuse on the nose of Little Boy. An archivistagreed to send Coster-Mullen a copy of theflawed diagram in the mail. Also included in thepackage was a partial diagram of the bomb’sinterior, a document that Los Alamos had neverbefore released. The diagram revealed that along gun barrrel had been screwed directly intoan adapter attached to the target case. Thiswas the first piece of hard information thatresearchers had about how the mechanisminside Little Boy was actually assembled.

Not long afterward, Coster-Mullen told me, heread a coffee-table book about the Enola Gay.The text described Little Boy’s gun barrel ashaving been made of wood, a suggestion thatwas clearly preposterous, and could havepassed muster only with a publisher of artbooks. The book also said that the gun barrelwas fifty-two inches long; the statement caughtCoster-Mullen’s eye, as it was virtually the onlypiece of specific dimensional information in thebook. “I figured that number might be a clue,”he recalled. “It probably came from somewhereelse, since the author clearly didn’t understandwhat he was writing about.”

That year, the Smithsonian commemorated thebomb’s fiftieth anniversary with an exhibitionabout the Enola Gay that featured the casing ofa Little Boy. (Perhaps a dozen Little Boys wereproduced.) The bomb had originally beenintact, save for its uranium, but in 1986 agentsof the Department of Energy arrived at themuseum and took the weapon away.Government officials were worried that aterrorist group with access to sufficientquantities of highly enriched uranium mightcommandeer the bomb, load it with fissilematerial, and set it off. The bomb was taken toan underground facility—supposedly situated inLos Alamos, beneath a McDonald’s—where itsinsides were removed. The gutted artifact wasreturned to the museum in 1993.

A small number of visitors to the Smithsonianexhibit may have noticed that the bomb had

been modified in a peculiar way. Whereas theexterior casing of the bomb had previouslybeen covered in a uniform coat of dark-greenpaint, the surface now had a series of crypticmarkings and numbers, including a “36” and a“52.” The nose of the bomb was marked withwhat looked like a “12.” Pictures of the alteredbomb casing began circulating among atomicresearchers.

When Coster-Mullen saw the “52” on the bombcasing, he immediately thought of the fifty-two-inch gun barrel that was mentioned in theEnola Gay book. The “12,” in turn, made himthink about a book called “Project W-47,” byJames Rowe, who was in charge of the bomb-assembly teams at Wendover, where the crewof the Enola Gay had trained before shippingout to the Pacific.

“At one point, Rowe gave a description wherehe looked inside the target case from the backend of the bomb, and he said it was bored outto two-thirds the length of the target case,”Coster-Mullen recalled. “Well, the target caseis thirty-six inches long, so two-thirds is twenty-four inches.” The “12” on the nose of the bomb,he guessed, might correspond to the remainingtwelve inches, which is where the front end ofthe physics package began. It was a typicalCoster-Mullen moment: he treats the world’smost destructive invention as an ordinaryclocklike mechanism, made of simple parts thatmust fit together according to readilydiscernible laws.

He knew from other archival investigations thatLittle Boy’s projectile was sixteen inches long.He realized that, by adding thirty-six andsixteen, he ended up with fifty-two—a numberthat almost certainly corresponded to theplacement of the front of the projectile thatwould be shot down the gun barrel at theuranium target situated twenty-six inchesaway. He had figured out the essentialgeometry of the bomb.

Coster-Mullen surmised that the numbers on

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the casing had been written by whoever hadbeen given the job of disassembling the bomband removing its interior mechanisms. Duringthe process of gutting the bomb and shipping itback to the Smithsonian, no one had botheredto wipe the bomb clean.

We were making our way toward Wyoming,through an empty stretch of Nebraskafarmland. A hummingbird perched on a wirefence outside my window. A yellow school buswith no wheels was marooned by the edge ofthe highway. In the middle of a field, someinventive local person had used aluminumtubing to fashion what looked like a dinosaurskeleton. We drove by a herd of cows. “A feedlot,” Coster-Mullen said, looking off to his left.A biotic stench soon vied against the pleasantfresh-leather scent that the car-rental placehad sprayed on our seats.

As we drove, I paged through declassifiedmemos from the machine shops at Los Alamos;these documents had provided Coster-Mullenwith several crucial details about the bomb. Iread aloud from a checklist used by CaptainWilliam Parsons, who loaded the gunpowderinto the bomb. The various items—“Insertbreech wrench,” “Unscrew breech plug (about16 turns, remove, place on pad)”—weremeaningless to me.

“Sixteen turns is important,” Coster-Mullensaid. Learning the number of turns had helpedhim to gauge the length of the breechplug—which Captain Parsons removed in orderto slip in the four silk bags filled with corditethat fired the gun that sent the uraniumprojectile smashing into its target. Coster-Mullen made his estimation by looking up thestandard Acme thread sizes from 1945 in amachinists’ book at the Milwaukee PublicLibrary, where he got his first library card.

The subdivision outside Milwaukee whereCoster-Mullen grew up was constructed forreturning veterans. Everyone got a narrow lotwith a nice back yard and a smaller front yard.

His parents’ house, built after the war, had afireplace, a basement, three bedrooms, anupstairs bath. Coster-Mullen, who was adopted,told me that his parents’ surname was Mullen.When I asked him where “Coster” came from,he gave me a sheepish look, then explainedthat he had added his wife’s last name to hisown. Hyphenated names are not exactlycommon among truck drivers, he said.

When Coster-Mullen was a child, he and hisfriends often spent Saturday afternoons at theFox Bay theatre, a movie house with curvedplaster walls, where popcorn was fifteen cents.Coster-Mullen loved the newsreels that camefirst, describing wars and new weapons and theconquest of space. He also enjoyed visiting hisgreat-aunt’s house, in northern Wisconsin.There was a little town square with a gazeboand a Civil War cannon. Attached to the side ofthe cannon was a metal box, and inside it was abrush with sharp steel bristles, which parkworkers used to clean out the cannon. Itthrilled Coster-Mullen to reach inside the darkbox and feel the brush pricking his finger.

The Milwaukee Public Museum was a twenty-five-cent bus ride from Coster-Mullen’s home,and it was one of the best places in America foran inquisitive child to spend an afternoon. Ageneration of German artists had immigrated tothe city and introduced the art of creating full-sized dioramas filled with cunningly imaginedand finely worked details that took fulladvantage of the laws of perspective and thetaxidermic craft. In a scene set in the GrandCanyon, a stuffed mountain lion was depictedin midair, ready to pounce on two mule deer. Ina Pacific Northwest diorama, you could see asalmon drying on a rock, with giant trees andice-capped mountains in the background. At thenearby Milwaukee County Historical Society,there was an intricate scale model that allowedviewers to gaze upon, in every direction, thechaos of the Battle of Gettysburg.

In grade school, John Mullen woke up every

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morning at six o’clock to watch a fifteen-minuteeducational television program in whichscientists like Ernest Lawrence, who inventedthe cyclotron, stood in front of a blackboardand lectured on the basic principles of physics.His favorite teacher in high school, DarwinKaestner, had worked at the University ofChicago during the Second World War, in ametallurgical lab that was part of theManhattan Project. The lab was run by GlennSeaborg, who discovered plutonium. Kaestnersaid tantalizingly little about his experiences.Coster-Mullen and Kaestner made a bubblechamber out of glass, in which they detectedthe movement of subatomic particles. Workingas Kaestner’s lab assistant, Coster-Mullenbecame an apprentice to a man who, twodecades earlier, had helped to produce theinitial quantities of plutonium that were used inthe first atom bomb.

Coster-Mullen’s next big breakthrough on LittleBoy came in 1995, when he obtained a curvedfragment of the tungsten-carbide tamper fromone of the dozens of test units built by theManhattan Project. An engineer had saved thefragment from the Anchor Ranch test site, inLos Alamos. The purpose of the cylindricaltamper was to reflect neutrons back into thecritical assembly, thus containing the chainreaction for a fraction of a second, until enoughmatter was converted into energy to destroyHiroshima. The tamper fragment was half aninch wide, an inch long, and two inches deep. Itbore a notable resemblance to the State ofIllinois.

“It occurred to me that perhaps I could getsome dimensional information by analyzing thefragment’s curvature,” Coster-Mullen recalled.He took the piece to a friend’s brother, whoworked in the quality-control department of alarge manufacturing facility in Milwaukee.“They have huge granite-block tables formaking precise measurements of finishedmachine pieces,” he said. A spring-loadedprobe touched the curved surface at twenty

different points. Thirty seconds later, a numberpopped up on a screen indicating that theoriginal diameter of the tungsten-carbidecylinder was 13.1513 inches. “That was a bigclue,” Coster-Mullen explained. The diameter ofthe cylinder gave him a maximum distance ofone inch between the cylinder and the outercasing. He was getting closer and closer to afull understanding of the inner workings of theatomic bomb.

We had driven more than nine hundred milesand been on the road for about sixteen hours.As we approached Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, theclouds, set against a cornflower-blue sky,seemed to glow from inside with a pale,marvellous light. A tanker truck was on theroad ahead of us, passing a field of windturbines. Behind the turbines was a freighttrain loaded with containers.

“You see how they are stacked two high, one ontop of the other?” Coster-Mullen asked,pointing at two containers. “They put one ontop of the other in the same clamp holes thatwould hold it to a chassis.” The landscaperolled by his window, like an engineer’sblueprint.

The initial years of Coster-Mullen’s researchwere marked by dozens of small revelationsabout the bomb’s mechanics. But, starting in1998, he began to uncover the most tantalizingof Little Boy’s secrets—a finding thatcompletely revised the received understandingof how the Hiroshima bomb worked. Coster-Mullen’s discovery revolved around what mightbe called the “sex” of the bomb.

In the standard historical accounts, the waythat the bomb’s gun mechanism worked was byshooting a cylindrical “male” uraniumprojectile into a concave, stationary uraniumtarget. This act of atomic coitus created a masssufficient to produce a critical reaction. Themass of the projectile was said to be 38.5kilograms, and the mass of the target was saidto be 25.6 kilograms. But no matter how many

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times Coster-Mullen did the math the numbersnever quite worked out in a way that allowedthe projectile and the target to fit inside thegun barrel while remaining subcritical.

The source of the error, Coster-Mullenrecognized, was an assumption that every(male) researcher who studied the subject hadmade about the relation between projectile andtarget. These scholars had apparently beenunable to conceive of an arrangement otherthan a “missionary position” bomb, in which asolid male projectile penetrated a vessel-likefemale target. But Coster-Mullen realized thata female-superior arrangement—in which ahollow projectile slammed down on top of astationary cylinder of highly enricheduranium—yielded the correct size and mass.

The atomic-research community was initiallydubious about Coster-Mullen’s argument. Buteven Richard Rhodes, after examining theevidence, admitted that Coster-Mullen wasright. Little Boy was female. (Rhodes told methat the drawings in his own book are“seriously deficient,” and said of Coster-Muller,“He came out of left field and really didsomething that I think is pretty dazzling. Heworked out a way to see through the ballisticcasing of the weapons to see what’s inside.”)

Coster-Mullen said that his insight into the sexof the bomb was connected to a discussion thathe had, in 1994, with an engineer namedHarlow Russ, who had worked on ProjectAlberta—the code name for the bomb-deliveryportion of the Manhattan Project. Russ was oldand sounded shaky when Coster-Mulleninterviewed him over the phone, and he refusedto answer basic questions about the size of theproject’s nuclear stockpile, or to say how manynuclear weapons he had manufactured. Butthere was one point that he needed to makesure was on the record. As Coster-Mullenrecalls it, “In the middle of the interview, hejust blurts out, ‘You know the projectile washollow, didn’t you?’ I said, ‘What do you mean,

hollow?’ ” Russ’s description of a hollowprojectile was at odds with the diagrams inevery history book and every museum displayabout the bomb. At the time, Coster-Mullen hadsuspected that Russ was senile. But he storedthe incident in his memory, along with aninjunction from a Los Alamos archivist to “trustHarlow.”

Little Boy sitting on its wheeled transport carriage

A year later, Coster-Mullen received in the mailcopies of four file cards from the NationalArchives, which contained a detailed synopsisof an eighty-two-page paper that had once beenin the archives but was withdrawn. The papersummarized on the cards may or may not havebeen, in turn, a summary of a longer and moredetailed secret history of the Little Boyprogram. The file cards were also withdrawn,but not before they were copied by a civilianresearcher who distributed copies to people hejudged to have the capacity to do meaningfulwork on the history of the bomb (and whoweren’t likely to report him to the government).

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The four-by-six-inch cards contained vitalstatistics about the Little Boy combat unit,including when each of the bomb’s majorcomponents was tested and the productnumbers of those components. They gave theexact length of the bomb’s projectile: sixteenand a quarter inches. The cards also indicatedthat the uranium-tipped projectile containednine stacked rings of active material, with atotal mass of 38,531.12 grams; and that theuranium target contained six stacked disks ofactive material, with a total mass of 25,616.44grams.

“It didn’t work out to my satisfaction, no matterhow many times I tried,” Coster-Mullen toldme. “By now, I’m driving trucks, and I was allalone on the interstate with very few cars, andI’ve got my pocket calculator in one hand and alittle sketchbook on my lap, and I’m writingdown numbers and calculating the numbers,and finally I determined that Harlow Russ wasright.”

It was the end of the second day of our journey.We were now in Wyoming, driving in deep-purple darkness; high mountains were distantlyvisible, looking as if they had been spray-painted on velvet. “If you could see this indaylight, you would be even more impressed,”Coster-Mullen said. His bladder was about toburst, he confessed. Over the past three hours,he had consumed three twenty-ounce bottles ofDiet Coke.

There is an absurdity as well as a grandeur toCoster-Mullen’s investigations. After all, a manlike Harlow Russ, the bomb engineer, couldhave spared him thousands of hours of troublesimply by explaining how the device worked.But the men who built the bomb weren’ttalkers. They were proud of keeping secrets,just as they were proud of what they had doneto defeat Japan. When the war was won, thecountry turned in on itself, in order tosafeguard the deadly knowledge that thegadget-builders had acquired. We remain

fascinated by the story of the bomb, in part,because it shows us who we were at the exactmoment that we became the people we arenow.

I asked Coster-Mullen what he thought aboutthe fact that so many eminent historians gotthe story of the bomb wrong. “I now readeverything with a jaundiced eye,” he said.“People use my book as a source, they rewriteit, rehash it, and their work still comes outwrong. And, actually, I read their books and go,‘This is really good!’ If I didn’t know anythingabout the subject, I’d be raving that this is areally terrific book. It’s easy to read, it’sexciting. Absolutely! Sure! But it’s wrong.”

The next morning, we were in Wendover, thebase where Coster-Mullen’s replica of LittleBoy was housed. We had arrived late theprevious night, and checked into the MontegoBay Casino Resort. Coster-Mullen had wokenup at five o’clock. “I don’t sleep much,” he toldme. We got in the car and headed to WendoverAir Field, where the crew of the Enola Gaytrained for six months. I shaded my eyes fromthe glare bouncing off the Utah salt flats. Thesharp sunlight led me to notice a crack in theleft lens of Coster-Mullen’s glasses. When lighthit the crack, it appeared as a tiny bright starfloating in front of his eyeball.

The Enola Gay crew arrived at Wendover onDecember 17, 1944, on the forty-firstanniversary of the day that the Wright brothersproved that men could fly. The bombing andgunnery range at the base eventually came toencompass three and a half million acres ofdesert, salt flats, and mountains, making it theworld’s largest military reserve. B-29 crewsdropped hundreds of weighted bomb casings,in order to develop ballistics tables for theelephantine munitions that ended the war. ByFebruary, 1945, Wendover had more than sixhundred buildings, and nearly twenty thousandresidents.

Now the only sign of habitation in this atomic

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ghost town was a handwritten sign that said“Laundromat.” Here and there, inside the sun-bleached barracks with shattered windows, Idetected the sound of fluttering wings. Theeeriness of the place was heightened by theunnaturally flat, bright sunlight, whichresembled the light used on television shows toillustrate near-death experiences.

Two F-16 fighter jets disrupted the quiet.Coster-Mullen, who was slathered insunscreen, drove us to the secure areas of theold base, near where the Enola Gay practicedits maneuvers. We parked next to two coffin-like pits in the desert floor. The wind soundedlike the hiss on old-fashioned tape recorders.

Coster-Mullen climbed down into one of thepits, which were each six feet deep, twenty feetlong, and twelve feet wide; they had once beenused as loading bays for the test units. Inpreparation for bombing Hiroshima andNagasaki, the pilots of the 393rd BombardmentSquadron dropped a hundred and fifty-fiveLittle Boy and Fat Man test units in the desert,honing the sharp turns that they would need toescape the blast. We returned to the car anddrove to two barely discernible concretepatches on the desert floor, where the bombshad been assembled, inside huts whose floorshad been covered in copper and attached togrounding wires, in order to eliminate anystatic that might accidentally set off a bomb.When the war was over, the huts weredisassembled and sent to Sandia NationalLaboratories, in Albuquerque, where theybecame the world’s first nuclear-bomb-assembly factories. “There was also a circustent that they used for a while,” Coster-Mullenadded, scanning the floor for stray bits ofcopper to stick in his pockets.

We walked over to a nearby enclosuresurrounded by barbed wire. In the middle of itwas a four-by-eight-foot concrete block thatlooked like an ideal place to sacrifice a sheep.In fact, machinists and engineers had used the

block as an operating table for Little Boy. Iwalked across the concrete to examine thealtarpiece of the atomic age. A large crack ranthrough it.

Our last stop at Wendover Air Field was thedeparture lounge of the small airport thatserves charter flights from Salt Lake City. Pastthe security-screening area was a coffeemaker;next to it, cream and sugar were laid out in oldArmy helmets. Coster-Mullen’s bomb was in aLucite case across from the coffeemaker, nextto a soda machine.

“This is a replica of the Uranium bomb that wasdropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945,” aplacard read. “It was dropped from an altitudeof 30,000 feet and exploded 1,500 feet abovethe ground.” The actual height of the explosion,Coster-Mullen explained, was closer tonineteen hundred feet.

Up close, Little Boy is a comfortingly handmadesubmarine-shaped object, painted hunter greenand covered with plugs and wires. Inscribed onthe surface of Coster-Mullen’s replica are thenames of the Enola Gay flight-crew members,who signed it, in 2004, at a ceremony inWichita, Kansas. When Little Boy was deployed,Coster-Mullen said, wires on top of the devicewere attached to a solenoid unit on the roof ofthe bomb bay. When the bomb dropped out, thewires came loose from switches inside theclock-box—the brain that told the bomb to dropfor forty-five seconds before detonating. On topof the bomb were three green “safing” plugs,arranged in an L shape; as the crew got readyto drop the bomb, they replaced the greenplugs with red arming plugs. Beneath were sixbarometric switches made in Delavan,Wisconsin, which is on one of Coster-Mullen’sdelivery routes.

I told Coster-Mullen that the bomb looked likesomething that he had put together in hisgarage. He agreed: “In today’s terminology,this would be a garage bomb.” I asked him ifthere wasn’t something obscene about an

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exhibit that commemorates the incineration ofninety thousand civilians, who were among thelast victims of a war that was pretty much over.“Well, there was no indication that they weregoing to surrender,” Coster-Mullen said. Headded that most of the fifty million people whodied in the Second World War were civilians.

Fat Man outside of an assembly building

I asked Coster-Mullen why the governmentinsists on classifying even the least significantdetails about this decades-old device. Heshrugged. Actually, he said, nothing about thebomb is secret. He smiled and added, “Thesecret of the atomic bomb is how easy they areto make.”

Coster-Mullen began driving home toWisconsin through the verdant plains andmountain passes of the American West. It waslate afternoon, when color contrasts heightenand objects take on an unusually warm glow;photographers, he noted, call this time thegolden hour. He pointed to a clump of trees ona nearby ridge: “Look at the stand of trees byitself, illuminated.”

Coster-Mullen seemed to know the historybehind everything that could be seen from thehighway. “You see those three crosses there,up on the bluff?” he said, pointing out the

window. “There’s some millionaire who payshomeless people to put them up.” Still, therewere things about Little Boy that continued toelude him. “Even the placement of where theuranium core is centered, front to back—that’sstill up for grabs,” he told me. Nor has heaccounted for the entire weight of the weapon;government documents have offered figuresranging from eighty-nine hundred to ninety-seven hundred pounds.

Tired and hungry, we drove for hundreds ofmiles and talked some more about the bomb. Atone point, though, he changed the subject andtold me about the person he admires the most:Gene Smith. “He was a photographer who usedto work for Life,” he said. “I wouldn’t say hewas exactly temperamental, but he had aspecific vision.”

O n e o f t h e p i o n e e r s o f A m e r i c a nphotojournalism, Smith is probably mostfamous for his photo essay “Country Doctor,”which chronicled the practice of Dr. ErnestCeriani, of Kremmling, Colorado. In the seriesprinted in Life, Ceriani was pictured in ahospital emergency room stitching up a two-year-old girl who had been kicked in the headby a horse. “Gene Smith told what life wasreally like in America,” Coster-Mullen said,when I asked why he admires Smith so much.“You would just sit with a collection of hisphotographs and wonder how could you havereached that exact point in three-dimensionalspace to make that image of somewhere soambiguous and beautiful.” Smith was famousfor his fights with editors; everyone who everworked with Gene Smith described him as apain in the ass. But his photographs helpedredefine the way that Americans see.

“One in particular, I remember, was a black-and-white photograph that he took in Japan,”Coster-Mullen said, as we drove through thedarkness. “On the left side of the photo was thesweep of a passenger train with the engine offin the distance, and the cars running out of the

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frame. The remainder of the photograph was arural scene with two Japanese farmers talkingto each other in the middle of a very whiteroadway.”

What bothered and fascinated Coster-Mullenwas the question of where, exactly, thephotographer had been standing in order tocapture two utterly separate moments in asingle frame. Coster-Mullen said that he usedto wonder: “Was he standing on a bridge, or upon a berm or an embankment? Was hephotographing just the train, and then hehappened to notice the two farmers? Or was heconcentrating on the perfect composition ofthese two people communicating with eachother, and the train just happened to go by atthat exact moment?” He was in his earlytwenties at the time, and just starting hiscareer as a photographer. The question ofwhere Gene Smith stood nagged at him.

In the late sixties, Coster-Mullen got to spend aday with Smith, when he visited the Universityof Wisconsin. “I asked him respectfully abouthow he had created that particular photograph.He told me, ‘It was simple. I was on the train.’ ”

Coster-Mullen recently had a chance to put hisresearch to the test. In May, he flew to Londonto examine the Imperial War Museum’s versionof Little Boy—which he believed to be the onlyversion of the bomb that had not been guttedby the Department of Energy. During a longcorrespondence with the museum staff, Coster-Mullen had portrayed himself as a kindly,unaffiliated researcher who wanted to take afew measurements for an independent historyof the atom bomb. He was careful not to tellthem that the Department of Energy haddisemboweled the four Little Boys available forpublic display in the U.S.

Accompanied by his son, Jason, who works onsecure-communications equipment for the Iraqigovernment, in Baghdad, Coster-Mullen and Iturned up at 7:30 A.M. at the museum, whichonce housed Bedlam, the old lunatic asylum.

We waited outside, next to a section of theBerlin Wall, for the museum staff to arrive.(The museum opens to the public at ten.) InCoster-Mullen’s hand was a soft-sided briefcasethat contained a folder with black-and-whitephotographs of bomb parts from his book,along with five photocopies of a cross-sectiondiagram of the bomb (“in case I fuck one up”)and a device that Coster-Mullen called theGizmo—a modified version of a SeeSnakedigital camera, which resembles the flexiblemetal probe used by plumbers to clear blockeddrains. Coster-Mullen had modified thebusiness end of the SeeSnake with a tinyhomemade ruler; he had also outfitted it with afoam mount that would let him shoot video witha Canon pocket camera. It was easy to see whyhis work is addictive. With each new bit ofinformation, Coster-Mullen was edging closerto cracking the code—“like a safecrackerlistening to those little clicks,” as he put it.

Coster-Mullen kept up an easy patter with themuseum curator as we walked past the oldrockets, guns, and tanks on display. He casuallyextracted a pen that a museum staffer hadstuffed into the open bolt hole in the nose ofthe bomb case, in order to block visitors frompeeking inside. Then he began quoting factsand figures about the weapon, with the dualaim of authenticating his status as a bombexpert and convincing the museum directorthat he was a harmless bore. The curator, astolid Northerner, gamely stayed with Coster-Mullen for an hour. I sidled up to Jason andasked him how he deals with his father’s fire-hose-like intensity. “I try to curb it, but thatusually doesn’t work,” he said, with goodhumor. Coster-Mullen’s wife and childrenappear to have little interest in the mechanicsof the first atom bombs; it is easy to come awaywith the impression that they see John’sprofound engagement with his favorite subjectas a waste of time, a pose that on laterexamination seems like a Midwestern way ofshowing pride in his accomplishments whileguarding against the possibility of a swelled

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head.

Coster-Mullen ran his tape measure in and outof the bolt hole and across the bomb’s surface,for comparison with the mysterious numbers onthe gutted bomb that had been returned to theSmithsonian. “What the hell are these slots?That’s a new wrinkle!” Coster-Mullen said,peering through the SeeSnake into the bomb’sinnards. “Hey, Jason, put a piece of white taperight at that point,” he instructed his son. Themuseum director politely stifled a yawn, thenleft.

Coster-Mullen relaxed, and started rubbing hishands together and mumbling with fervor.“Aha, look at that, here are the vents,” he said,pointing to four of them. “Now watch me rotateit,” he went on, moving the SeeSnake around,and letting me peer inside the bomb. “So that’show they did that!” he said more than once.The bomb gives up its secrets reluctantly. WhatCoster-Mullen had found was not the holy grailof an intact target block that he had beenhoping for. But it was a significant discoverynonetheless: the gun barrel had beenconfigured to vent the air displaced by thehollow uranium projectile when it was firedtoward its target. “I suspected there werevents, but I didn’t know how they wereconfigured,” he said. “This is totally off thewall! This will shake them.”

The Imperial War Museum’s bomb was nowcovered in numbered tape, and surrounded byblack-and-white photographs, sectionaldiagrams, and homemade tools. With visitorsalready trickling in, Coster-Mullen took out aclean cross-section diagram and began toinscribe his new discoveries. “Nobody knowsabout the position of the vents,” he told me.The four vents beyond the gun tube were “thelast big thing I’ve been dying to see. I can’t tellyou how many times I’ve disassembled thebomb in my dreams.”

Human beings are proud of what theycreate—no matter how controversial or deadly.

Edward Teller revealed the essential secrets ofthe hydrogen bomb in a popular encyclopediaarticle. In 1995, Robert Henderson, the chiefengineer for the Manhattan Project, sent backto Coster-Mullen an early version of the “AtomBombs” manuscript, with comments such as“shit” and “pure shit,” and then went on toexplain the exact (and still classified) processby which engineers made the lens molds thatcast the explosives that squeezed the core ofFat Man until it achieved critical mass. Readingthrough President Truman’s diaries, at theTruman Library, in Independence, Missouri,Coster-Mullen found an entry dated July 25,1945, in which the President marveled that “13pounds of the explosive” had made the shottower a t A lamogordo , New Mex ico ,disappear—a pretty accurate estimate of theamount of nuclear material contained in FatMan.

Coster-Mullen’s research project can beconstrued as a danger to mankind or as auseless antiquarian endeavor. Given that afunctional atomic weapon can be constructed inmyriad ways, why does it matter precisely howthe first bomb worked? Yet Coster-Mullen isproud to have helped establish “a public,permanent record of the facts” about theManhattan Project. As maddening as hispersonality can be, it is hard to imagine whatAmerica would look like without the small andshrinking number of people who engage inpainstaking, firsthand research in order toseparate the truth from the body of supposedfacts, and who keep the rest of us honest. Acorollary of this insight, of course, is that muchof what we think we know is wrong.

Coster-Mullen is still trying to figure out moreabout the bomb, and the U.S. government haslittle interest in helping him. The knowledgethat his bomb will always be a partial andimaginative construction—that it can onlyasymptotically approach the actual bombdropped on Hiroshima—is, at times, difficult forhim to accept. “Nobody is ever going to take

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me over to Los Alamos and say, ‘O.K., you canplay with it,’ ” he said, wistfully. “I want toknow. But it will never happen.” ♦

This article appeared in The New Yorker onDecember 15, 2008.

Recommended Citation: Lawrence Wittner and

David Samuels, “Atomic John: The Bomb asFetish” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 1-2-09,December 29, 2008.

Slide show of original article's pictures.(http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/12/15/slideshow_081215_atomicbomb)