Both men had PhDs in physics, but they had no nuclear expertise and even less access to research. The covert operation's code name was Nth Country Project, and anything the young men produced would be classified as top secret—whether they got it right or not.
Ironically, the two amateurs were helped generously by information made public by the "Atoms for Peace Program," President Dwight Eisenhower's idea of spreading the word about the "benefits" of non-military nuclear power around the world.
Two years after they began their work, they were finished. They were kept in the dark about whether they succeeded, but after two weeks of intensive questioning, senior researcher Jim Frank took them aside to explain the results. He said that if their work had been constructed, it would have made a pretty impressive bang. When they asked how big, he replied "on the same order of magnitude as Hiroshima."
"It's kind of a depressing thing to know, that it could be that easy," Dobson says. Creating an A-bomb turned out to be so easy that both Dobson and Selden came away feeling very concerned about their own capabilities!
