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When I was five, my father let me work (play) as a demonstrator for computers he'd built, showing prospective purchasers just how easy computers were to program and operate now that they used new-fangled things like core memory instead of vacuum tubes.

I never got to play with the missile guidance systems, though. Now that I think about it, maybe that's just as well.

Like a lot of kids probably are, at that age, I thought that rockets and missiles were cool; I'd built a ball mill and mixed up various types of rocket fuel. My mother still hasn't forgiven me for the time I blew up the stove, but it didn't make that big a hole, really.

I got a hot plate at a garage sale after that and did the rest of my rocket engines that required melting the fuel outside. I never did have another accident involving rocket fuel, though there were some dramatic mishaps involving a small pulsejet engine and then later the attempt to resurrect a really big Tesla coil that somebody else had partially built and then abandoned. Turned out there was a really good reason to have abandoned that particular design, but at least the results were dramatic.

Somewhere I must still have some of my notes and diagrams from when I was around six or seven. Over the years, I always grouched a bit when some news program would make a big deal over a college student figuring out how to make an atomic bomb--come on, guys, even I was able to track that kind of information down when I was in single digits, it's not very hard. Later when I was working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I made a point of attending seminars on the design and construction of nuclear weapons. Not that I plan to do anything of the sort for real, but if nothing else I could verify that my designs from back then would have worked, even as unsophisticated as they are by modern standards. Some of them, anyway; my ideas on how to build hydrogen bombs were pretty much off-the-mark and I'd overlooked some rather obvious things.

But that was a passing interest anyway, so maybe that excuses some poor thermonuclear weapon designs at least a little.

I hadn't planned to write an essay on ideas I'd had for blowing things up when I was a kid, but making rockets and the like was a big interest of mine back then. Growing up reading science fiction probably had an influence there; my father subscribed to Amazing (which turned into Analog ) and I'd read those magazines and books I could find by Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, Lester Del Ray, and other writers in the SF genre. Averaged more than a book a day for a long time. Computers and rockets and bombs--the "cool stuff" of childhood, I suppose. Of course I did like Legos and even had some Tonka trucks too; I never tried to blow them up, at least, though I did build a whole lot of spaceship models out of Legos.

I still have a lot of those old issues of Analog and my old Legos (Lego building sets #4 and #5, even), but I'm afraid that the Tonkas went their separate ways long ago.