John Aristotle Phillips

John Aristotle Phillips (born August 1955) is a U.S. entrepreneur specializing in political campaigns, who became famous for attempting to design a nuclear weapon while a student.

Phillips was born in August 1955 to Greek immigrant parents and raised in North Haven, Connecticut. In 1976, while attending Princeton University as a junior undergraduate, he designed a nuclear weapon using publicly available books and papers. In February 1977, several months after the story first went public, Phillips was contacted by a Pakistani official trying to purchase his bomb design, an incident addressed on the Senate floor by William Proxmire and Charles Percy. Phillips was a celebrity by this time, dubbed The A-Bomb Kid by the media, and making a series of television appearances including a featured spot on the game show To Tell The Truth.

Phillips was an underachieving student who played the tiger mascot at Princeton games. Hoping to stay at the school, he proposed a term paper for a seminar on nuclear proliferation outlining the design for an atomic bomb similar to the Nagasaki weapon. Whether the weapon as designed would have actually exploded was questioned. Dr. Frank Chilton, a California nuclear scientist who at that time specialized in nuclear explosion engineering, said Phillips’s design was “pretty much guaranteed to work.” However, Phillips' faculty advisor Freeman Dyson, a renowned physicist, and professor Harold Feiveson, who held the seminar, said Phillips' design was not functional. Nevertheless, the Federal Bureau of Investigation confiscated Phillips's term paper and a mockup he had constructed in his dormitory room. In 1979, Phillips published his story together with a co-author, David Michaelis, as Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid (ISBN / ISBN ).

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