In the pantheon of astonishing academic achievements, few stories capture the imagination quite like that of John Aristotle Phillips, a Princeton University student who sketched out the design for a functional atomic bomb on a budget that would barely cover a used car. The year was 1976, and the episode, unfolding during a tense era of the Cold War, presented the United States with a provocative question: Could a physics student with a modest budget and access to public documents indeed design a nuclear weapon?

Phillips, known as the “A-bomb kid,” crafted his design for a physics seminar, using only his nuclear engineering textbook and two unclassified government documents. The bomb he described was sophisticated enough to fit inside a U-Haul trailer and could be assembled for approximately $2,000—a stark contrast to the millions typically spent on nuclear armaments. His professor acknowledged the viability of the design, but his design was not actually built. Moreover, in comparison to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, this bomb design has been said to be more sophisticated and complex.

The implications were chilling. As Phillips himself remarked, “any other physics major could do this better.” The idea that political terrorists or non-nuclear states could replicate his work and create a devastating weapon was a frightening prospect for the U.S. government. In a move that underscored the potential threat, the FBI confiscated his paper.

The project earned Phillips an A, the only one in his seminar, and catapulted him into a strange sort of stardom. He was approached by foreign entities, including officials from France and Pakistan, eager to acquire his research. His story was syndicated across national newspapers, and he even made appearances on television game shows. Eventually, he detailed his experience in the book “Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid,” co-written with David Michaelis.

Phillips’s brush with nuclear fame had a profound effect on his trajectory. He became an anti-nuclear activist, ran for Congress twice, and later founded Aristotle, Inc., leveraging his political savvy into a successful career. His firm, specializing in political campaigns and data analytics, has since served every occupant of the White House since Ronald Reagan.

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