John Aristotle Phillips
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Aristotle Phillips, known as the A-Bomb Kid, was a junior undergraduate at Princeton University in 1977 when he designed a nuclear weapon using publicly-available books and papers.
Phillips was an underachieving student who played the tiger mascot at Princeton games. Hoping to stay at the school, he proposed a term paper outlining the design for an atomic bomb similar to the Nagasaki weapon. Though Phillips was under the supervision of Freeman Dyson, the story was widely circulated in exaggerated form. Nevertheless, the FBI confiscated Phillips's term paper and a mock-up he had constructed in his dormitory room. Phillips and a co-author published his story as Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid (ISBN 0-671-82731-6 / ISBN 0-688-03351-2) Phillips parlayed his celebrity into a brief career as an anti-nuclear activist, ran for Congress, and became an inventor and entrepreneur.
Phillips today is CEO of Aristotle, a non-partisan technology consulting firm for political campaigns that he co-founded with his brother Dean. [1] Aristotle has served every occupant of the White House since Ronald Reagan, and consults for several top political action committees.[2]
