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, leading to him being dubbed The A-Bomb Kid by the media.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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 has served every occupant of the White House since Ronald Reagan, and consults for several top political action committees.