Nth Country Experiment

"The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield", the report on the experiment read, "A working context for the experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give a small nation a significant effect on their foreign relations."

[3] The next year, Pipkorn dropped out of the project and was replaced by Robert W. Seldon, a captain in the United States Army Reserve.

[4] The experiments the physicists completed were split into three phases, each representing the "attainment of a physical level of understanding."

Phase I was the understanding of basic concepts and considerations of bomb design, much like the process of creation originally undertaken by J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.

Phase II was the quantitative expansion of those basic concepts into practical application by calculating core mass, hole size, explosive thickness, etc., which are essential to the careful design of atomic weapons.