Nth Country Experiment
The Nth Country Experiment was an experiment which began in May of 1964 and was conducted at the Livermore Radiation Lab in order to see if a few capable young physicists with no prior weapons experience would be able to develop a working nuclear weapon design using only unclassified research, and basic computational and technical support.
The experiment ended on April 10, 1967, after only three man-years of work over 2 and a half calendar years. It was deemed by weapons experts that the team had come up with a credible design for the technically more challenging implosion style nuclear weapon. It is likely that they would have been able to design a simpler gun combination weapon even more quickly.
Due to the increased amount of publicly available resources regarding nuclear weapons, it is reasonable to assume that a viable weapon design could be reached with even less effort today.
see also: nuclear proliferation, nuclear warfare, nuclear strategy, nuclear terrorism
