"Lawrence Radiation Laboratory hired three fresh PhDs with little nuclear physics background and asked them to go build a nuke, and they did." No, they didn't.

"Lawrence Radiation Laboratory hired three fresh PhDs with little nuclear physics background and asked them to go build a nuke, and they did." No, they didn't. They designed a nuke. Not the same as actually building one. Designing a nuke is not at all difficult, and indeed the linked article describes how they decided to design a plutonium-based implosion device rather than a uranium-fueled gun-type device specifically in order to make the project more challenging than it otherwise would have been.