John Aristotle Phillips

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John Aristotle Phillips (born August 23, 1955) is a U.S. entrepreneur specializing in political campaigns, who became famous for attempting to design a nuclear weapon while a student.

"A-Bomb Kid"[edit]

Phillips was born in August 1955 to Greek immigrant parents and raised in North Haven, Connecticut.[1]

Phillips attended Princeton University as an undergraduate. He was a major in physics, and played the tiger mascot at sports events.

While an undergraduate physics major at Princeton University, he attended a seminar on arms control in which he read John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), which profiled the nuclear weapon designer Ted Taylor. In the book, Taylor argues that there was no real barrier to the development of crude nuclear weapons, even for terrorists, other than the possession of fissile material like enriched uranium or separated plutonium. Any "secrets" that had existed had long been declassified. Taylor's argument was made in the service of urging for stronger fissile material controls in the United States and abroad.[2]

For his junior-year independent research project for his physics degree, Phillips decided that he wanted to try and prove Taylor's thesis correct, in the sense that anyone could design a plausible nuclear weapon based on information in the public domain. As he later wrote:

Suppose an average—or below-average in my case—physics student at a university could design a workable atomic bomb on paper. That would prove the point dramatically and show the federal government that stronger safeguards have to be placed on the manufacturing and use of plutonium. In short, if I could design a bomb, almost any intelligent person could.[3]

The physicist Freeman Dyson agreed to be his advisor of the paper, but told Phillips that he would give him no classified information. Ultimately he relied upon first-principles derivations of the physics of nuclear weapons, information obtained from declassified books and reports (including the Los Alamos Primer), and information obtained from making phone calls to contractors and chemical companies under false pretenses, in order to work out the specifications for a crude plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapon and the mathematics required to show it was plausible. The final paper, "The Fundamentals of Atomic Bomb Design: An Assessment of the Problems and Possibilities Confronting a Terrorist Group or Non-Nuclear National Attempting to Design a Crude Pu239 Fission Bomb," was turned in by Phillips in May 1976. Dyson gave it an "A". He also removed it from circulation. Contrary to many hyperbolic stories of this event, the paper was never seized by the US government or the FBI.[2]

Whether the bomb design would have worked, in the sense of achieving the yield Phillips estimated it to have if it were actually constructed, is unknown, as predicting the performance of crude bomb designs is not straightforward. As Dyson later put it:

[Phillips] had mastered quickly and competently the principles of shockwave dynamics. But his sketch of the bomb was far too sketchy for the question "Would it actually explode?" to have any meaning. To me the impressive and frightening part of his paper was the first part [in which he described how he got the information]. The fact that a twenty-year-old kid could collect such information so quickly and with so little effort gave me the shivers.[4]

Another student in the course told a reporter at the Trenton Times about Phillips paper. Phillips was advised by Taylor, who now worked at Princeton, that going "public" with his story might help avert the sale of a nuclear reactor to Pakistan from France, which Taylor thought would be a good idea given the proliferation potential of such a sale. Phillips agreed to be the subject of the story. The story ended up being syndicated and re-written by national newspapers, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. In many of these stories, the original intent of Phillips — to show that there were really no "nuclear secrets" — was overlooked. Instead, they focused on how Phillips had acquired the "secrets", and some even implied that he had built, and not just designed, a weapon.

Several months after the story first went public, in February 1977, Phillips was contacted by someone from the Pakistani embassy trying to purchase his bomb design. Phillips went to the FBI.[2] The incident was addressed on the Senate floor by William Proxmire and Charles Percy.[5]

Phillips had become a minor celebrity by this time, dubbed The A-Bomb Kid by the media,[6][7] and making a series of television appearances including a featured spot on the game show To Tell the Truth.[5]

In 1979, Phillips published his story together with a co-author, David Michaelis, as Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid (ISBN 0-671-82731-6 / ISBN 0-688-03351-2).

Political activity[edit]

Phillips parlayed his celebrity status into a brief career as an anti-nuclear activist. In 1980 and 1982, he ran for the United States House of Representatives as a Democratic Party candidate in Connecticut's 4th congressional district, losing both times to Republican Stewart McKinney.[8]

Aristotle, Inc.[edit]

The experience he had gained during his campaigns obtaining the voter list from the state and using it for campaign purposes led him and his brother Dean (who had written a program to handle the list on an Apple II) to found Aristotle, Inc. in 1983,[8] a non-partisan technology consulting firm for political campaigns which John Philips has since led as the CEO. It specializes in combining voter lists with personal data from other sources (such as income, gun ownership or church attendance) and data-mining, to assist with micro-targeting of specific voter groups; as of 2007, its database contained detailed information about ca. 175 million U.S. voters and it had about 100 employees.[8] Aristotle has served every occupant of the White House since Ronald Reagan, and consults for several top political action committees.[9]

In 1998 he spoke of the critical importance to a political campaign of targeting its advertising, including on the World Wide Web.[10] In 2009 he observed that 8.9% of registered voters in the United States are ineligible to vote because they have moved away or died.[11]

As of 2007, Phillips lived in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.[8]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Vollers, Maryanne (August 7, 1980). "The A-Bomb Kid Runs for Congress". Rolling Stone. No. 323. Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. pp. 42–43. Archived from the original on December 16, 2018.
  2. ^ a b c Wellerstein, Alex (2021). Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States. University of Chicago Press. pp. 326–331. ISBN 9780226020389.
  3. ^ Phillips, John Aristotle; Michaelis, David (1978). Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid. William Morrow. pp. 85–86. ISBN 0688033512.
  4. ^ Dyson, Freeman (1981). Disturbing the Universe. Harper and Row. p. 164. ISBN 9780060111083.
  5. ^ a b Michaelis, David (July 18, 1977). "What's A Nice Kid Like John Phillips Doing With an A-Bomb?". New York. Vol. 10, no. 29. NYM Corporation. p. 66.
  6. ^ Peterson, Charles (May 8, 1977). "John Aristotle Phillips: The A-Bomb Kid". Youngstown Vindicator. Retrieved July 24, 2011 – via Google News.
  7. ^ Collins, Paul (December 16, 2003). "The A-Bomb Kid". The Village Voice.
  8. ^ a b c d Verini, James (December 13, 2007). "Big Brother Inc". Vanity Fair.
  9. ^ Juckem, Garth (February 2, 2016). "Aristotle's Integrity Launches Solution for European Union's Fourth Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Directive". Aristotle Integrity. Aristotle International. Retrieved January 3, 2024. Since 1983, every U.S. president — from Reagan through Obama — have used Aristotle's solutions...
  10. ^ Lindlaw, Scott (June 17, 1998). "Politicians Slow to Embrace Web". The Washington Post. Associated Press. Retrieved October 29, 2009. 'If you're advertising for Lands' End and you run an ad that doesn't appeal to 50 percent of viewers, all you're doing is wasting money,' said John Aristotle Phillips, president of Aristotle Publishing, which supplies Internet advertising. 'If you run an anti-abortion spot that offends viewers or gets out the vote you don't want, you're not just wasting money, you're losing the election.'
  11. ^ Harper, Jennifer (October 29, 2009). "Inside the Beltway - THEY'RE ALL GONERS". The Washington Times. p. A9. Uh-oh. Zombie voters walk. The nonpartisan research group Aristotle International compared federal, state and local lists of deceased or relocated voters to reveal Wednesday that 16,331,707 (or 8.9 percent ) of all registered voters are 'deadwood' - a 3 percent increase compared to last year. In all, nearly 10 percent of voters listed on registration rolls are ineligible to vote. "Deadwood on voter rolls complicates the electoral process and can cause problems like fraud and vote miscounts. It always creates a perception of low voter turnout," company CEO John Aristotle Phillips tells Beltway "It gets down to this: by depressing turnout, dead voters make the rest of us look bad." They also deplete campaign funds.

Further reading[edit]

  • John Aristotle Phillips and David Michaelis (1978), Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid, New York: Morrow, ISBN 0688033512 .

External links[edit]

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