themes. "I became fascinated with the two worlds that coexist in America now," he says. "The one world of ordinary citizens, like the kid in the movie who has all the concommitant problems of adolescence - sex and girls and school . . . and then the other world, which is the world of the military–industrial complex, and within that world the sort of high-priesthood of nuclear-weapons planners and designers. . . . You read through the books and these guys are really creepy: scary and fascinating, and very brilliant and very elitist and very condescending to the rest of the world. And very divorced from any sense of consequence, from any sense of ethics or morality." He also thought "it might be a good idea to approach the bomb as another consumer item, which in a sense it is. You know, it provides a lot of jobs, a lot of work, and ironically a lot of good side-effects." Brickman later said he was inspired by an article he read in Scientific American on laser separation of trans-Uranic elements. He developed the structure with a collaborator Thomas Baum. The plot was likely influenced by the case of John Aristotle Phillips, a Princeton University undergraduate, who came to prominence in 1977 as the "A-Bomb Kid" for designing a nuclear weapon in a term paper using publicly available books and articles. "I was afraid people would say I ripped off the subject," Brickman said. "That I trivialized it, that I took a less serious view – that I just used the subject to get some laughs." Brickman was inspired by meeting a former atomic scientist who made windmills and greenhouses. He asked the scientist why he did, and he said "Well, you're sitting in your office and if it works, then you're creating temperatures and pressures that existed only during the creation of the universe. For a millionth of a second, you get to play God. And you can't just walk away from that." Brickman says he "wanted to show that the kid, just like the scientists, is seduced by the technology. It's like a form of chicken: How close can I come to the edge here? I wanted to show how you could get embroiled without any regard to consequences. Which is what happened to the guys involved in the original Manhattan Project. They became hooked; they were just too far