What worried them was the unknown.
How many more nations are working on nuclear weapons without their knowledge?
Which country would be next to develop nuclear weapons capability?
How easy or difficult it would be to accomplish that?
The proliferation of nuclear-armed states was a matter of concern for it could create an unstable and perilous world.
They called it the Nth Country Experiment.
It’s a very strange story, Selden toldThe Guardianin an interview in 2003.
I went to DC and we spent an evening together.
As the evening wore on, I knew less and less.
I went away very, very discouraged.
Two days later a call comes through: they want you to come to Livermore.
Dave Dobson in 1964.
Rob Selden
Dave Dobson was inducted into the project in a similarly surreal fashion.
He only learned afterwards what he was expected to do.
The duo was banned from consulting classified research but anything they produceddiagrams and notesautomatically became classified.
Dobson’s knowledge of nuclear bombs was rudimentary at best.
He had never heard the terms Trinity, Little Boy, or Fat Man.
Seldan was equally clueless.
He found a book on the Manhattan Project that culminated in America’s development of the bomb.
It gave us a road map, Dobson said.
But we knew there would be important ideas they’d deliberately left out because they were secret.
Implosion-bang out nuclear gear.
You really have to do it right, and there are thousands of ways to do it wrong.
you’ve got the option to’t just guess.
It’s kind of a depressing thing to know, that it could be that easy, Dobson said.
That’s an acceleration of the arms race, and I didn’t really want to do that.
