Alex WellersteinVerified account

I met Ted in the 1980s. He was very down-to-earth. Talk like this was a warning about the dangers of the technology based on his direct experience (and subsequent conversion away from building bombs, even if he found the work "sweet"), not boasting or hyperbole.

Perhaps. But physicists are often very full of themselves and, if they feel they have a cause, can exaggerate.

Taylor’s comments about non-state actor construction of nukes come to mind as being potentially hyperbolic. Or, as someone else put it: it may be trivial to him but we’re not all Ted Taylor.

I tend to feel that a physicist with an interest in this today, and access to fairly typical computing power, could without much effort design an implosion device that they'd have reasonable confidence in working based on open source info.

But I think it would have been a LOT harder in the 1960s-1970s. Both because the amount of (and access to) public domain info on this was much more limited (I have seen what it looks like when smart people have compiled it then, it's not that impressive), and

because of the computer thing. I think most people today take for granted the computational power at our fingertips but non-gov people in the 1970s could barely do 1-D models on commercial computers. We have easy access to LOTS more today, and that opens up possibilities.