Class notes: How to build a nuclear bomb

The class helps students who hope to pursue careers in the intelligence community.
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- If a nuclear-free Iraq graduates from President Bush's "axis of evil" list, could Georgetown University gain admission?
It all depends on those signed up for "How to Build a Nuclear Bomb," a class at the university's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. On a recent Wednesday, 20 graduate students attended the class, part of a yearlong course titled "Nuclear Technologies and Security," at the school's Center for Peace and Security Studies.
Clutching publications such as "Deadly Arsenals," "Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy" and other light reading, the students, a mix of men and women in their 20s dressed in jeans and preppy shirts, crammed into small desks for a two-hour lecture by Charles D. Ferguson, a physicist, former naval officer and scholar who worked at the State Department's nonproliferation bureau and at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Most of the students hope to pursue careers in the intelligence community or the foreign service, specializing in nonproliferation issues, not weapons design. Graduates of such programs a decade ago are now wrestling with national security issues such as the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea.
"You need a class like this because many people who work in the policy world have a sophisticated understanding of foreign cultures and the difficulties and challenges surrounding nuclear issues but not the science that underlies many of those concerns," said Daniel Byman, director of the security studies program. "It complements other classes in the program, such as proliferation in general and Iran foreign policy."
But if those in the room (and based on some of the questions, there were at least two such students) thought they'd be able to walk out with the exact recipe for a nuclear bomb -- one of the most tightly guarded secrets in the U.S. government -- they were disappointed.
Relying on crude drawings to illustrate an implosion device, how uranium is enriched to weapons grade and where high explosives are placed in the simplest of nuclear devices, Ferguson sought to give his class the best view possible without training a new generation of bomb designers.