A bomb that only kills a dozen people is still a bomb. And there are a lot of nuclear reactions that can run away and release a lot of fission energy very quickly.
The challenge in weaponizing those reactions is to make the device safe enough to be handled before you make it explode on command.
An amateur is not going to produce a tunable-yield warhead. They're going to make a little boom with a bright neutron+gamma flash and then take their Darwin Award.
Producing the basic science to perform transmutation and isotopic separation was certainly part of Manhattan, but the project could not end until an actual weapon was in hand. The explosive shockwave lensing required for a compact implosion-type device is not necessary, as you can much more easily reproduce the gun-type device by slapping together two subcritical masses with your bare hands, or using neutron reflectors, hence my mention of the "demon core".
If an amateur produced enough pure fissile material, accidentally making a bomb out of it could be as simple as putting it away on the wrong shelf of a cabinet and then going to bed. There is a huge gulf between "bomb" and "bomb with practical military application". The Manhattan scientists had to both come up with bomb ideas and narrow those down to practical weaponized designs.
If you can produce a breeder reactor in a garden shed, you can eventually obtain a critical mass of fissile materials. And if you have a critical mass of fissile materials, you can create a nuclear bomb. If you are careless or reckless, you can even do so accidentally. It wouldn't necessarily advance science or engineering, but it is possible for a sufficiently-motivated amateur to do it--not very likely, but possible.
It is that inkling of a possibility of accomplishing something great that motivates crackpot hobbyists to try to create antigravity devices or free energy collectors in their garage from old television antennas and refrigerator compressors. Not a single one of them has a snowball's chance in Hell of producing useful incremental advances in the useful sciences, so the only chance they have at success or recognition is to go for the big score.
You can't find the Higgs boson in your garage on a hobbyist budget. You can't find exoplanets with your dinky little telescope. You can't make B-E condensate with a laser pointer. You can't even build a Honda Civic replica from scratch. All the amateur scientists have nowhere to apply their energies, because the low-hanging fruit is taken. The smarter ones focus on applying existing science to real-world problems, like designing hexayurts or open-source hardware. The rest attempt the impossible, and delude themselves into thinking they are creating reproducible results.
I want them to succeed in the same way that I want the Avengers to defeat Thanos. It would be a really cool story, but deep down, I know it's just science fiction.
There are plenty of things that _are_ within the reach of garage scientists, and exoplanet detection is one of them [1] as well as lots of other astronomy, as well as Biology [2] a surprising amount of advanced materials / electronics / etc [3] and more.
The challenge in weaponizing those reactions is to make the device safe enough to be handled before you make it explode on command.
An amateur is not going to produce a tunable-yield warhead. They're going to make a little boom with a bright neutron+gamma flash and then take their Darwin Award.
Producing the basic science to perform transmutation and isotopic separation was certainly part of Manhattan, but the project could not end until an actual weapon was in hand. The explosive shockwave lensing required for a compact implosion-type device is not necessary, as you can much more easily reproduce the gun-type device by slapping together two subcritical masses with your bare hands, or using neutron reflectors, hence my mention of the "demon core".
If an amateur produced enough pure fissile material, accidentally making a bomb out of it could be as simple as putting it away on the wrong shelf of a cabinet and then going to bed. There is a huge gulf between "bomb" and "bomb with practical military application". The Manhattan scientists had to both come up with bomb ideas and narrow those down to practical weaponized designs.
If you can produce a breeder reactor in a garden shed, you can eventually obtain a critical mass of fissile materials. And if you have a critical mass of fissile materials, you can create a nuclear bomb. If you are careless or reckless, you can even do so accidentally. It wouldn't necessarily advance science or engineering, but it is possible for a sufficiently-motivated amateur to do it--not very likely, but possible.
It is that inkling of a possibility of accomplishing something great that motivates crackpot hobbyists to try to create antigravity devices or free energy collectors in their garage from old television antennas and refrigerator compressors. Not a single one of them has a snowball's chance in Hell of producing useful incremental advances in the useful sciences, so the only chance they have at success or recognition is to go for the big score.
You can't find the Higgs boson in your garage on a hobbyist budget. You can't find exoplanets with your dinky little telescope. You can't make B-E condensate with a laser pointer. You can't even build a Honda Civic replica from scratch. All the amateur scientists have nowhere to apply their energies, because the low-hanging fruit is taken. The smarter ones focus on applying existing science to real-world problems, like designing hexayurts or open-source hardware. The rest attempt the impossible, and delude themselves into thinking they are creating reproducible results.
I want them to succeed in the same way that I want the Avengers to defeat Thanos. It would be a really cool story, but deep down, I know it's just science fiction.