The McGyver Bomb

Item #: SCP-XXXX

Object Class: Safe

Special Containment Procedures: Media worldwide is to be monitored continuously for the presence of SCP-XXXX with a particular emphasis on social media and the defense networks of rouge states IT resources of terrorist groups all IT infrastructure worldwide. Algorithms using the ABSOLUTE LATEST in machine learning techniques which are to undergo CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT AND CONTINUOUS RELEASE are to be run which analyze text relating to SCP-XXXX and ascertain whether it is being propagated harmlessly<HA!> as part of a joke or meme, or as a viable weapon. In cases where it is being propagated as a weapon we must make every effort to track down and neutralize those propagating it, while removing any traces of their text from the web. Propagation of SCP-XXXX has already reached the point where we cannot realistically expect to contain it, and has entered an emergency crisis management phase due to the extreme danger posed to humanity by SCP-XXXX. Any individuals suspected as having been exposed to SCP-XXXX are to be given an amnestic.— Any mention of SCP-XXXX in media of any kind is to be removed at any expense. Any mention of SCP-XXXX as a viable weapon rather than a joke is to be ascertained through machine learning algorithms in constant development, thoroughly investigated, the intentions and beliefs of said subject ascertained, and the individual terminated only as an absolute last resort to prevent people from taking information contained within SCP-XXXX seriously. In cases where SCP-XXXX-1 instances have been constructed, the constructed instances are to be confiscated and replaced with non-functional replicas without the knowledge of the device's manufacturer.

The foundation's copy of SCP-XXXX is stored in site 22 in a reinforced room with no less than two guards standing watch at a time. An airlock ensures that only one person is allowed in at a time, and that any person that enters the room receives a class A amnestic upon exiting the room. A printout of a Facebook post that has been blown up and laminated. exists within the room along with basic kitchen appliance and tools. The room is periodically stocked with the materials required to use SCP-XXXX.

Description: SCP-XXXX is an infohazard that describes a process by which a 280 kiloton fourth generation hydrogen bomb - hereafter referred to as SCP-XXXX-1 - may be easily constructed from relatively common, readily available ingredients. A person looking to create SCP-XXXX-1 could acquire all the ingredients to build SCP-XXXX-1 in an afternoon spent shopping at a Home Depot and Walmart.

The infohazard was initially created 2 years ago, and it quickly spread through the Internet to the point where it was obvious that traditional containment methods would not be possible. The foundation then, facing worldwide nuclear annihilation, enacted procedure 12-skillshot-beta, which partially neutralized the existing information by flooding the internet with a disinformation campaign centered around joke memes containing variants of SCP-XXXX that have been subtly changed from the original to ensure that devices built from the instructions will not work. The intention of the joke memes was to get people to view SCP-XXXX as harmless rather than as a credible design for a thermonuclear bomb.

This strategy has been wildly successful, as the world has not ended. This strategy has also been a dismal failure, as nearly everyone with internet access now has seen detailed instructions for the creation of a thermonuclear device. In addition to that thousands of thermonuclear bombs have been created, the vast majority of which remain unaccounted for. At any moment someone could test one of these devices, determine that they work, and report their findings and proof to the Internet. Simulations of the effects of the efficacy of SCP-XXXX becoming public show detonations happening across the world followed by a deep nuclear winter.

Notes on the construction of SCP-XXXX-1:

The device described by SCP-XXXX is fiendishly simple. Unlike other thermonuclear designs which take large teams tens of thousands of man hours to construct, the SCP-XXXX process takes approximately 20 hours to complete. Most of that time is spent waiting for something to heat up or cool off so the actual amount of time a person spends working on the device is usually under 2 hours.

The design itself exploits standard scientific principals that have all been well understood for at least 30 years, and combines inventive use self organization in biological systems with acoustics, the properties of pressurized ice and basic chemistry to grow a highly spherical, extremely high explosive shell.

Notes on the Construction of the High Explosive Shell (HES):

The bulk of the effort in constructing the device goes into producing the HES. The HES will wind up being 10 centimeters in diameter and roughly 3 centimeters thick. If produced successfully it will be dark brown in color with tiny silver streaks criss-crossing its surface in a fine, random but evenly distributed fractal pattern. The interior of the shell should be a lighter brown and contain a finer version of the surface fractal pattern.

Those with proper clearance may view Addendum: SCP-XXXX-A below for a partial recipe which includes the ingredients list:

Discovery:

The foundation became aware of the existence of SCP-XXXX shortly after a massive explosion was observed in Death Valley California. Foundation seismographs picked it up and immediately alerted MTF Gamma 103 "Radium Girls" who were quickly deployed. A US military team arrived before foundation personnel. Their team quickly began to suspect the explosion was anomalous in nature due to the lack of significant radioactive release at the site. MTF Gamma 103 concurred and took over the investigation. Satellite imagery from the time of the event pinpointed a possibly anomalous man driving a yellow Ford F150 pickup truck at ground zero shortly before the blast.

The "anomaly", turned out to be one David Kilpatrick, a graduate student in Electrical Engineering from Berkley.

MTF Gamma 103 questioned him and he confessed to designing SCP-XXXX, manufacturing an SCP-XXXX-1 instance and detonating the completed bomb. He apparently wanted to see if it would work.

MTF Gamma dispatched agents to take Kilpatrick to site 22 for further investigation. They were not at all convinced that Kilpatrick - who admitted to micro-dosing hallucinogenic substances - was telling the truth, so the team continued to investigate the death valley area for anomalous activity. Their search was called off two days later when it was determined that his claims were legitimate.

It was difficult for the science team at site 22, consulting with Kilpatrick and other SCP personnel remotely, to conclude that the design actually worked, and that Kilpatrick was the likely cause of the explosion. Shortly after arrival to the site, Kilpatrick pointed them to a guide containing a random list of everyday ingredients and a very short set of instructions on his Facebook page. That recipe is of course SCP-XXXX. The simplicity of the design as well as the wording of the recipe along with Kilpatrick's admitted drug use made the investigation difficult. Some researchers suspected that Kilpatrick micro-dosing had convinced him that he was somehow the cause of the incident. Others suspected that Kilpatrick must be anomalous himself, that his presence at ground zero proved he was related and thus anomalous. Only after using harsh interrogation tactics on Kilpatrick and giving him the time he needed to recover and explain how the design worked did the science team start to suspect that the recipe was legitimate. The bomb's mechanism of action is complicated, but not so complicated that our science team couldn't recognize it as plausible. Only then, only once the truth of Kilpatrick's story began to be taken seriously did our researchers recognize that in addition to containing Kilpatrick they needed to contain the recipe as it represented a nuclear proliferation threat out of our wildest nightmares.

Release:

As explained in the previous section, by the time SCP-XXXX's existence was made known to the foundation it had already been released on social media.

The Foundation hacked into Facebook and ran a search on their servers to find all IPs which had downloaded SCP-XXXX. After doing some digging, the identities of all users that had viewed the page were processed and agents were sent out to administer amnesics to households that had viewed the page, and confiscate and destroy any computer equipment that had ever been in contact with SCP-XXXX. Unfortunately, by this time more than 96 hours had passed since the first bomb had gone off and more than a week had gone by since SCP-XXXX was first posted on Facebook.

When the first bomb went off, the Foundation was unable to keep the news away from it. It was covered on every major news network, but more importantly the sound of the blast and the mushroom cloud that followed were proof enough for everyone that saw Kilpatrick's post that his design worked. Even if the Foundation had purchased every major news network on the planet (an action we took soon enough anyway), there was no easy way to hide the obvious confirmation of Kilpatrick's claim on the horizon.

The best we could do was get the US military to take responsibility. Military officials were put in front of cameras claiming that the detonation was an accident during what was supposed to be a training exercise. This helped slow the spread of rumors, and helped paint SCP-XXXX's involvement as a bad conspiracy theory, but the threat lingered.

At that point, knowledge of recipe began to spread quickly. It moved from Facebook to Reddit, Twitter and Instagram. We recovered 11 completed bombs in the first week after the blast, and another 35 in some state of manufacture. People weren't just building them because they had a grudge, they were building them with the intention of seeing if the conspiracy theory was true. The only thing that got us through that week was the 20 hours it takes to complete a bomb. Had it been 15 hours one of them would have been detonated.

Unfortunately, 20 hours was not enough to get us through the second week.

A second bomb went off in Cananea Mexico 8 days after the first. It is believed that this bomb was constructed by Garcia Martinez, a 28 year old laborer that had been working in the Death Valley area when the first bomb went off. Cell phone transmission records indicate that he had been chatting about the design on Reddit before the second explosion. He is presumed deceased, along with all 31,000 residents of Cananea that day.

By this point the foundation had secured around a sizable chunk of the world's major media outlets - including many in Mexico, so we were able to direct coverage to minimize the spread of SCP-XXXX. Cananea is a small city surrounded by mountains, and the weather was favorable for us that day. The explosion was reported as having occurred at a industrial plant in the city, and since few of the residents of Cananea survived to say otherwise, the story stuck. All roads leading to the city were blocked and a story about highly cancerous chemicals needing clean up was manufactured. Those that had witnessed the event and survived were tracked down and given amnestics to prevent rumors of a second nuclear detonation from spreading. People inquiring about their family members were universally told that while many people from the city survived, their family members did not and that they must not come to Cananea and risk being contaminated themselves.

Unfortunately while the cover-up was done professionally, it was not enough to prevent an acceleration of the spread of SCP-XXXX. SCP-XXXX continued to be spread at an exponentially growing rate. By two weeks after the explosion there were 10,000 confirmed copies of it in the wild. People were noticing that pages containing SCP-XXXX were going down as well as the cover-up was confirming the reality of the instructions.

On the tenth day after the first blast our teams recovered 28 functioning bombs and the components for 72 more. At this point containment measures were deemed to have failed and our computer simulations unanimously predicted an imminent class IK end of the world scenario. Initiative 12-skillshot-beta was enacted.

Initiative 12-skillshot-beta:

12-skillshot-beta was a procedure that had been developed by our memetics teams shortly after the first bomb went off. It was developed as an absolute last ditch effort at a contingency plan should SCP-XXXX spread beyond the ability of the Foundation to contain it.

The idea of 12-skillshot-beta was to create false copies of SCP-XXXX (hereafter referred to as SCP-XXXX-2) as a means of containing the Infohazard. This would drown out the originals, and hopefully contain it by out-competing it in popular culture. Instances of SCP-XXXX-2 would be made to drown out SCP-XXXX by "memeifying" SCP-XXXX-2. The meme was to follow the model of "rick rolling", whereby you trick someone into looking at a SCP-XXXX-2 instance by giving them a link to it but saying that its something else.

Hundreds of conspiracy sites were launched about SCP-XXXX-2, all with minor changes to the original design. Social media was flooded with them. Reddit, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. A YouTube video was created featuring a prominent celebrity that pretended to buy into the "McGuyver Bomb" conspiracy theory. The video showcased him constructing the device with a very serious tone. The device instructions used on the video had been changed in two ways, first the beer had been poured into the mold in step <REDACTED> rendering the device useless. Then the simple alarm clock based detonator was replaced with a large candle. The idea was to subtly alter the design, either in the ingredients list or in the instructions, such that the final product would be rendered in-viable.

The video then had the celebrity catch his pants on fire and jump around foolishly after trying to ignite it with the candle. The video was designed to be entertaining and it worked, getting near record numbers of views for a YouTube video. SCP disinformation personnel then began following the rick-rolling pattern online, intentionally tricking people into viewing either the video or SCP-XXXX-2.

It worked.

SCP-XXXX-2 skyrocketed in popularity, and almost certainly prevented a cataclysmic chain reaction of detonations. Monitoring of SCP-XXXX postings however showed that despite the fact that the SCP-XXXX-2 variant had eclipsed SCP-XXXX in the public eye, posting containing SCP-XXXX continued to go up. For a while, anyone sharing posts containing legitimate instances of SCP-XXXX were targeted by the foundation and either memory wiped, terminated or abducted for use as CLASS D personnel. Soon there were too many to target however.

The major upside of the celebrity propaganda video seemed to be the candle. When people did unknowingly successfully follow the instructions on original variants of the meme, they almost never attempted to wire it to an alarm clock, and almost always tried to mimic the events of the celebrity video, pretending to set their pants on fire before flopping around on the ground.

Aftermath of Initiative 12-skillshot-beta:

Millions of joke "McGuyver Bombs" are produced every year. 99% of these follow the broken SCP-XXXX-2 recipe. Unfortunately that 1% that are produced using the original recipe means it is estimated that thousands of working thermonuclear bombs are produced.

The Foundation continuously attempts to find and destroy any functioning bombs. The first case of us finding one in the wild was at a flea market. The seller had built it at a party and was selling it for $20. After that we started finding them everywhere. On the desks of executives a major corporations, in elementary school classrooms.

Six months ago a company started mass producing them for sale as novelty toys. There were plenty of companies at the time producing the false version, but this was the first time a company started manufacturing them using the original recipe. The foundation bought this company, heavily expanded its operations and now mass produces non-functioning bombs in the hope that it will keep people from building them themselves.

Addendum SCP-XXXX-A:

Making a big… big boom!

I think these instructions are for a very powerful bomb. Make sure you are AT LEAST 5 miles away from this baby if you choose to set it off. I'm gonna try it out on in the desert on Sunday and see if it works!

Ingredients list:

• 1 measuring cup*
• 1 Quart Paint thinner
• 6 standard packages of Aluminum foil
• 1 bar unscented soap
• 1 gallon of water
• 1/2 quart Motor Oil
• 1 lb potatoes
• 3 60 watt light-bulbs
• 8 rectangular pieces of plywood measuring roughly 8" x 12"
• 1 rubber bicycle tire
• 1 cup plant fertilizer
• 4 round glass Pyrex bowls
• 16 rubber bands (hair ties may be substituted for 4 of these, but at least 12 must be rubber)
• 2-3 rolls of Duct Tape
• A propane tank
• 18 ft of copper wire
• 4 aluminum cans (although you can get by just two, four cans is easiest to use).
• 1 Food Grade thermometer
• 1 Turkey baster
• 1 16 oz can of tomatoes - tomatoes may be crushed, peeled or in sauce form.
• 1 large wax candle. - Its used as a timer so get the biggest one you can find.
• 1 package baker's yeast
• 1 balloon
• 1 9 volt battery
• 1 large cooler.
• 1 bottle of beer (or whatever alcoholic beverage you prefer)

In addition the device requires access to a home oven, blender, kitchen knife, tweezers, scissors, measurement stick and freezer.

To produce the shell one must first

<REDACTED - THIS SECTION ONLY AVAILABLE IN CONTAINMENT AREA FOR SCP-XXXX>.

Congratulations, most of the work is now done! Have a beer to celebrate!

The nuke should by now be have hardened enough to be handled without damaging its structure, but should still be soft enough to cut easily. Use a kitchen knife to bisect the shell. I'd cut it say 4 centimeters from an edge, but it doesn't really matter and will work if you just cut it in half. At this point the nuke should be put in the freezer until frozen. Leave it there overnight.

To arm the bomb just insert a water balloon. The water balloon should be inflated with tap water and placed with the rubber nozzle facing down such that the top of the balloon is smooth and roughly spherical and a good seal can be made between the balloon and the shell of the device once the top of the shell is placed over it.

Now freeze it one more time and you're good to go. The shell has excellent thermal insulation properties similar to Styrofoam so it can be transported for quite some time before the device needs to be re-frozen. That said, I recommend that the device be stored inside a large cooler when being transported to ensure the highest possible explosive yield.

Note: The shell of the nuke is flammable at this point, and will out-gas paint thinner for quite some time. It goes without saying that smoking when carrying or handling it is a bad idea if you aren't planning on committing suicide with it.

To detonate it, just place a tall candle on it. Make sure you use a tall candle! Once the fire burns down to where its close to the surface of the shell the shell will ignite and you'll get the big boom you've been working for!

Addendum: SCP-XXXX-B-14

Interview with Kilpatrick

Note: Kilpatrick has recently gone through some harsh interrogation measures and been given just enough time to recover.

Interviewer: Kilpatrick, again we need to know what you know about the explosion in death >
valley. You know we're serious now, if you continue to fuck with us things will not go well for you.

Kilpatrick> <screaming> For fuck's sake I already fucking told you I was testing out an idea I came up with last week. What the fuck do you want to hear.

Interviewer> <sighs audibly> Okay Kilpatrick, we'll play along, how exactly did you create a 280 kiloton explosion?

Kilpatrick> I was reading some of the old cold fusion papers, the ones where a small space in a palladium foil is packed with water and a current is run through it to separate it out into oxygen and raw hydrogen. I don't know how much you know about science, but this process is called hydrolysis. When using palladium as your conductor in hydrolysis, hydrogen was said to work its way between the palladium atoms, and this spatial cramping was believed to greatly increase the chance of a having a fusion event. That research is largely considered discredited now, and rightly so, but perhaps the idea of packing hydrogen into atomic scale traps before applying heat makes some sense. My undergrad degrees were in physics and chemistry, so I thought, what if I replaced the palladium with…

<15 minutes of the interview, containing highly technical details removed to prevent widespread nuclear proliferation>

<a researcher enters the room>

Interviewer> So you're sticking by your story that you used a fucking candle to ignite a 280 kiltoton thermonuclear bomb? Are you some kind of fucking masochist?

Kilpatrick> <sounds introspective, ignores threatening tone> Yeah man, like I said, I was really high when I wrote that. It made sense at the time, and I was still coming down when I finished building it. I didn't really expect it to work, I mean, I knew that it was possible but…

<Researcher> <addressing Interviewer> You can stop the interview, what he's saying is entirely plausible.

<Researcher><addressing Kilpatrick> David, where are you working currently, I believe my organization could use someone that can really think outside the box as…

<end of interview>