That Time I Made A Hydrogen Bomb (In Year 9)

This is all a completely true, if somewhat embellished story, of an incident from year 9, written a week after the event in question...

By Jack Swan

I nearly realised every schoolboy’s dream. Yes, I detonated a bomb in school.

If you were a bored primary schoolboy then you probably will have felt the impulse to raze your school off the face of the earth with no lean amount of explosives. I know I did. I didn’t, however, expect to nearly fulfil that childhood fantasy whilst in a seemingly boring science lesson on a dreary Wednesday morning. “This has got to make a pop...” were my last words before I accidentally ignited a small hydrogen bomb. In the classroom.

I should point out something first: this isn’t the same kind of hydrogen bomb that is carried on suborbital missiles to bring about global apocalypse in World War Three. I’m afraid not; this is merely hydrogen released from magnesium in acid catching fire and causing an Earth-Shattering Kaboom in a chemistry jar. If you know about the Hindenburg disaster you’ll know what I’m on about, albeit on a smaller scale. Still, this was no piddly little pop. In fact, a piddly little pop is why it all happened in the first place.

My dictionary at home describes naivety as thus: “Having or expressing innocence and credulity; ingenuous.” I think that sums up the pre-doomsday atmosphere in my mind quite well. We had attempted to capture escaping hydrogen in a test tube, and ignite it with a splint. Hopefully you all know that causes a ‘pop’ sound, and that was what we were trying to achieve. But after two failed attempts and a sense of moderate annoyance we had heard nothing.

“Ah, not again!” I huffed, glaring through misty, smudged and painfully uncomfortable plastic science goggles at the silent test tube.

“Oh well,” Trevor replied, in his stereotypical might-be-interested, might-not-be attitude. We stood in silence for a few seconds. (I should explain at this point that a few seconds often is enough to formulate the best and worst ideas in the history of mankind. It was probably only a few seconds for George Bush to decide to run for president – and look what that led to. In this case, I had a similarly bad idea. Not that I knew it was bad, of course.)

“What if...?” I asked, moving my hand to take the lazily glowing splint from Trevor’s hand, “We put the splint directly to the pipe where the hydrogen is coming out?”

He looked at me.

I looked back.

He looked at me some more.

And spoke. “Go on then.”

So, shrugging, and expecting only a mildly loud pop, I put the lighted splint to the tube. It seemed simple at the time – I merely placed the splint at the throat of the pipe, and waited. I don’t know how long for, but it seemed an eternity. Then things went a bit faster.

A lot faster.

The resulting detonation caused windowpanes to shatter in Taiwanese suburbs and according to certain unsubstantiated sources the shockwave rounded the globe no less than twenty seven times. Some say it caused a minor earthquake near Inverness, and led to a temporary closure of Heathrow airport as a Boeing 747 coming into land was jarred off course, impacting into Terminal 2.

All I know is that I was standing there, now-extinguished splint held quivering between petrified fingers; I was a nervous, trembling wreck, juddering in much the same way as would an old oak tree vibrating as an army convoy roars past.

Oh, and the bung on the jar had flown off and hit Trevor between the eyes, blasting the goggles off his face.

Following the localised cataclysm a ghostly silence fell across the classroom. That or my eardrums had been pounded like I had had a front-row season pass at a twenty-four-hour heavy metal marathon. Or both. Either way, there was a deathly hush as a crescent of awestruck students formed around a startled Trevor and me.

The first thing my scrambled psyche latched onto after registering the blast was my science teacher rushing towards us. Though I had temporarily been reduced to the mental coordination of a disaffected bee after a debate on the ethics of stem cell research in Chinese there was still enough intact grey matter in my skull to recognise the shape of a hurrying teacher – and to associate that with the word ‘trouble’.

Mind still frazzled I tried to scramble together some sort of excuse. It was like trying to type a novel with your nose – exceedingly difficult, and you mostly end up with a jumble of gibberish. Bracing myself for a volley of “Why did you do that?!” and “Did you even think about what you were doing?!” and “Detention after school!” I slowly tilted my head towards my teacher, fearing the worst.

“Are you alright?” she asked, hurried and concerned. I burbled a still-shocked reply, partly acting, partly residual shock. “I should have warned people not to do that,” she continues.

Oh...

As the class slowly returned to their stations to continue the experiment as it was meant to be done my teacher continued her talk, as I superglued my mind back together. Apparently, what I had done was cause a feedback explosion, and the resulting blast went to where the magnesium was still dissolving and releasing hydrogen, causing the underwear-fouling explosion. We were ‘lucky’ that the blast had only caused the bung to smash Trevor in his forehead, or else the whole jar might have shattered, filling us with glass pellets. It could have been much worse. Allegedly.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I slinked out of the classroom to my guitar lesson. Treading carefully past the dust piles and rubble heaps caused by the explosion, and the brave men and women of the emergency services trying to keep order amidst the chaos I had created I kept a low profile, whilst bubbling with a volatile mix of fear and excitement. As per my expectations, I have now gathered the titles of ‘terrorist’, ‘evil genius’ and ‘mad scientist’ to my name; fortunately the latter two are what I’ve always wanted to be recognised as! Chemistry definitely isn’t boring any more. The best part is, the government  decided not to launch an enquiry into why a small tactical nuclear device had been detonated on the top floor of an otherwise innocuous state secondary school, so I don’t have to fill in reams of paperwork and risk a court trial and jail sentence! But one of the stranger things is, my e-mail inbox seems to be filled with messages coming from a Mr ‘Osama’ – does anyone know who he is?

And just why he wants me to do a scaled-up version of the blast underneath the Pentagon?

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Apologies for the bit at the end making it a bit dated. Mr Bin Laden was still a big threat back when I wrote this, in early 2010! Also the descriptions are a bit heavy-handed - in my opinion - but I can't be asked to change it because I was very happy with how I wrote it at the time, and I guess it's got a certain charm about it. I hope you've enjoyed this (completely true) account of how I made a hydrogen bomb!