Thursday, November 29, 2001

This month's "Most Gullible" award goes jointly to John Simpson of the BBC (he who liberated Kabul) and Anthony Lloyd of The Times of London. They managed to mistake a 1979 spoof from the Journal of Irreproducible Results discovered in a bunker in Kabul for genuine instructions on building an atom bomb. To quote Anthony Lloyd:

"The vernacular quickly spun out of my comprehension but there were phrases through the mass of chemical symbols and physics jargon that anyone could understand, including notes on how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium into a critical mass producing a nuclear chain reaction and eventually a thermo-nuclear reaction."

No comments: