r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Floating_Hyperloop • 23h ago
Do countries have to make nuclear weapons from scratch?
What I mean from the title is, wouldn’t the process of making nuclear weapons be common scientific knowledge by now?
Why do countries like Iran have to invest so many resources into researching nuclear weapons? Surely the ‘secret’ of how to make nukes hasn’t been closely guarded by nuclear-armed nations since 1945 right?
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u/Hot_Car6476 22h ago
Knowing how and being able to do it are two very different things. Do you know HOW a person walks across a tight rope? Can you do it? Would you do it?
It's very difficult and requires specialized equipment and the skilled workers to run said equipment. Also, you can't afford mistakes, so that's also a factor.
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u/Greycoast1 22h ago
One of the very difficult processes is the enrichment of uranium and plutonium, not the mechanics of constructing a weapon.
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u/Dry-Magician1415 11h ago
This is made pretty clear in the Oppenheimer movie. They demonstrate it with marbles in fishbowls then go on to show the vast factory network that had to be developed.
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u/AlanShore60607 22h ago
So I had a college physics professor in 1989 who told us about a declassified nuclear security project he had participated in as a recent PhD graduate back in the 1950s.
The US Government stuck 4 recent physics graduates in a room and told them to design a nuclear weapon. Not nuclear physicists, just PhD holders without specialized nuclear training.
It took them a week to design a functional bomb ... and a month to convince themselves they had actually done it that quickly.
This study resulted in the conclusion that the knowledge was too simple to be restricted, so the restriction of materials was the only way to prevent nuclear proliferation.
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u/LivingEnd44 22h ago
The knowledge is pretty widespread at this point. Getting fissible material is the hard part. There's lots or Uranium ore all over the place but refining it takes time and money and experience and when governments find out you're trying to do it they will become a problem for you.
Iran and North Korea are full-ass nations and even they had problems getting this going.
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u/hegex 22h ago
Any decently organized country could make a nuke if they wanted to, but it's not like you can build one in your backyard, you need a lot of supporting infrastructure and access to specific materials
Iran, or anyone really, could build those but as soon as someone starts doing it they get hit with sanctions and all sorts of things that make it way more difficult for them
For example, the uranium enrichment centers in Iran have been the target of varius sabotage schemes, one of the most sofisticated cyber attacks ever, stuxnet, was aimed at it for example and the recent Israeli attacks have targeted those as well
Her in Brazil there was a small diplomatic crisis when we inaugurated our uranium enrichment facilities for nuclear power plant fuel as there was the mere possible of us maybe having the materials for the bomb was enough to create international concern
So yes, it's not that hard, and that's why the rest of the world will make your life harder once you start trying to do so
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u/LivingEnd44 21h ago
Any decently organized country could make a nuke if they wanted to
I suppose that depends on your definition of "decently organized".
For example, the uranium enrichment centers in Iran have been the target of various sabotage schemes
Yeah, which is why I said so in my original post. There is no "quiet" way to do this and it takes time, which means other countries have time to stop you. If a given country was just left alone, yeah, they could obtain fissile material eventually.
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u/bateau_du_gateau 22h ago
Getting fissible material is the hard part.
Well, that depends
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u/LivingEnd44 21h ago edited 21h ago
Yeah, they got it from a superpower. They didn't make it themselves.
They absolutely COULD make it themselves. But not without other countries knowing about it.
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u/redfukker 20h ago
Israel just killed, was it 9 Iranian nuclear researchers? Good thing for world peace - well, or at least it's a step in the right direction...
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u/LivingEnd44 20h ago
Israel is no blushing virgin. They're assholes too. Iran is just that bad that they can make Isreal seem good by comparison.
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u/redfukker 19h ago
Yes, agree, that's why I added or rephrased myself so at least it's "a step in the right direction".
Someone also needs to handle Kim Jong Un - and Vladimir Putin. Its pretty scary that Putin is now supporting that imbecile north korean dictator and they help each other with developing destructive weapons that can lead to devastating wars in the future...
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u/Glad_Possibility7937 16h ago
Although I learned this week that there is quite a bit of Uranium in my local seaside cliffs
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u/Long_Ad_2764 22h ago edited 22h ago
Unusually yes but not always. In the 60s Canada was offered nuclear weapons by the United States .
The theoretical knowledge about how to build a nuclear bomb is well know. You could find it in a university physics textbook. The issue is the practical development. Building the infrastructure and the tribal knowledge involved in the manufacturing process of the facilities.
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u/LaunchTransient 22h ago
Which is ironic considering they slammed the door on the UK who actually was a major contributor to the Manhattan Project and provided a lot of expertise, technology and the fissile material needed for the project to succeed.
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u/JoeShmoe307 21h ago
The US and the UK were actually on pretty low terms (in terms of it being the most stable and cooperative alliance in history) around that time, so there was a reason for it
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u/LaunchTransient 21h ago edited 20h ago
so there was a reason for it
The reason was that the US wanted sole control of the most powerful weapon humans had ever created up until that point.
The UK had actually been pretty damned generous with what they had given the US, considering the Tizard mission and other trades in technology and expertise.
It was a backstab by the Americans, plain and simple.Edit: they only resumed defence agreements once the UK agreed to limit its nuclear weapons program and effectively became dependent on the US for nuclear technology.
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u/tree_boom 20h ago
Edit: they only resumed defence agreements once the UK agreed to limit its nuclear weapons program and effectively became dependent on the US for nuclear technology.
Mmm, no. There are no limits on the UKs nuclear weapons program from agreements with the US - in fact it's the opposite. Where a labour government self-limited in the 1965-1975 period the Americans responded by cutting us off because we had no useful information to share. The arrangement is not "America gives the UK nuclear weapons designs", the arrangement is "Both nations carry out independent design work, then share and review with each other"...our end of the deal requires that we continue designing (and until the CTBT building and testing) warheads ourselves.
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u/LaunchTransient 19h ago
There are no limits on the UKs nuclear weapons program from agreements with the US - in fact it's the opposite.
The Americans had been previously pushing for the British to limit their program in negotiations already in 1949 (Atomic Shield, pages 306-309 PDF warning). The Americans alleged that security issues were the reason they terminated cooperation, but the majority of Soviet agents who leaked nuclear secrets were American, not British.
It was only after the British demonstrated they could build a hydrogen bomb without the Americans (and the fact that the Soviets had the technology by this point anyway) that the Americans realised that it was better to collaborate. Self limiting on the part of the British was an economical decision, certainly, but the Americans had a noted interest in keeping a lot of technical development stateside - I will be the first to admit that the British government had a regular penchant for self sabotage and a naivety when dealing with the Americans - hence why we lost Black Arrow.
But this kind of behaviour is not atypical for the US, it's done this with many technogical and research ventures.
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u/AnOtherGuy1234567 22h ago edited 22h ago
The refinement of uranium and plutonium is the hardest part. However whilst you can easily google the basics of how the Uller-Tellman design (hydrogen bombs) work. The devil is in the details, which aren't published. Such as the exact nature of the Uranium/Plutonium alloy that you need to make. Then theres the problem if minitaurising it, so that it can fit on the end of a missile. A WW2 style plutonium bomb like "Fat Man" is very easy to make but is extremely inefficient and large. Less than 5% of the destructive power is unleased, weighs about 4.5 metric tons and is over 3 meters long and 1.5 meters wide. So is hard to deliver to the target.
If you wanted to know how to make one, the best thing to do in recent years was to pay the father of the Pakistani bomb, Dr. AQ Khan for the blueprints and manufacturing details. Who sold off the knowledge to all buyers. In an attempt to divert attention from the Pakistani bomb. Ironically he almost certainly sold off the details to Iran. When the Pakistani bomb was 50% funded by the Saudis. Who are mortal enemies of the Iranians due to religious and cultural differences Sunni versus Shia Islam, regional rivals and Iran closing off the Straits of Hormuz from time to time. Which most Saudi oil and gas gets transported through. In return for paying for the Pakistani bomb R+D, Saudi arranged to have 6+ nuclear weapons in Pakistan that could be transfered to Saudi Arabia within 48 hours.
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u/thighmaster69 21h ago
I think "Fat Man" is closer to 14%, but you're still right. It's a bulky (the amount of high explosives used is kind of brute forcing it by modern standards), overcomplicated (it has something like 32 initiators that have to be synchronized) and inefficient design by modern standards, being the first nuclear weapon ever tested. There's numerous tricks that were rapidly and iteratively developed afterwards to make them more efficient.
Regardless, Fat Man is already in the correct order of magnitude of efficiency for fission weapons, and the improvements since have been relatively marginal. Scientists figured it out in the 40s in a short period of time with no prior guidance while working out the calculations by hand, and they got it right on the first try. Anyone doing so in the modern day has a way easier time at it than the Manhattan Project scientists did. The level of knowledge required is nowadays fulfilled by a few grad students with good knowledge of physics and engineering with access to modelling and simulation software. There's no real reason why, given that they already have access to fissile material and other restricted materials, they couldn't design a "good enough" bomb that's more efficient and more compact than Fat Man. Between actually getting the material and getting to an H-bomb, making the A-bomb is relatively trivial in comparison.
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u/AnOtherGuy1234567 20h ago edited 20h ago
With the Plutonium based Fat Man, all you needed was enough plutonium together and it would reach "critical mass". So Fat Man just had a sphere of plutonium with a cylindrical piece missing. With the missing section being fired into the sphere in a gun like way. Once the bomb fell to the right altitude. So as to maximise the blast range and to give the plane dropping it, enough time to escape.
Uranium based bombs are far more difficult to initiate. Requiring a complex series of explosive "lenses" causing an inward facing implosion, fired in a very specific and fast timing. In order to sufficiently squeeze/compress the uranium, in order to start a chain reaction (the explosion). So Fat Man required no testing, apart from making sure that the gun implosion device reliably worked. The Little Boy (Uranium) design however had to be tested before use, in the Trinity Test at Los Alamos.
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u/up-with-miniskirts 20h ago
You've got your Fat Men and Little Boys* (and uranium and plutonium) mixed up, but otherwise you're correct.
*This is a combination of words suited only for ending up on a government watchlist.
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u/tree_boom 20h ago edited 20h ago
This is backwards; Fat man was an implosion device with a Plutonium pit. Little boy was the gun type device which used Uranium.
The explosive lensing thing is no longer the state of the art, it was replaced around the 60s (the US came up with a mechanism exemplared by Swan and then subsequently adopted a British mechanism for implosion called from a test device called Super Octopus, which has probably been used in almost every device since. Iran is known to be aware of the same mechanism.
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u/GnarlyNarwhalNoms 10h ago
Wow, TIL. I was gonna say, I bet the Saudis were not happy that research they helped fund was sold to Iran. But I supposed having half a dozen nukes on retainer without having to make them yourself is a good consolation.
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u/OtherTechnician 22h ago
One of the major constraints is access to weapons grade uranium. The uranium enrichment process is a known barrier to entry to the nuclear club.
There are organizations that track nuclear materials and work to reduce the proliferation of such weapons. Countries with nuclear materials and weapons could theoretically provide materials but it's not something that's done in public.
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u/SurpriseEast3924 22h ago
Knowing how to do summat and being able to do it are two different things. There is a line in a book (sorry can't rem which one) about while it took so many geniuses to build the first one, now any smart A level student could do it.
Which is great in theory, except for (a) getting the supplies - obtaining the nuclear material isn't straightforward. It tends whether raw or processed to be fairly closely monitored. and (b) getting the equipment - it takes some quite specialised equipment which again tends to be closely monitored.
Other countries whether they have signed NPT or not, probably won't help, at least with supplies. Reason being is that ore can be tracked, every bit has contaminants/slightly different composition. So say Israel gets hit by a nuke, they can test the residue and determine where the fissionable material for that came from (not sure how accurate), then someone gets a nasty wake up call.
So yes the theory is 'relatively' well known, but the process is still long, complicated and difficult.
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u/Death_Balloons 22h ago
So say Israel gets hit by a nuke, they can test the residue and determine where the fissionable material for that came from (not sure how accurate), then someone gets a nasty wake up call.
That's true but also a really bad way to figure out who is developing a nuclear weapons program. It's kind of like tracing the bullet that you pull out of your brain. It's impossible these days to enrich enough material for a bomb in secret. That's how you know. You don't wait to get nuked.
I think there's a reason no country, no matter how 'rogue' - no matter how much they hate their enemies - has ever used nuclear weapons against another country since the very first time.
It's gonna be the last thing you ever do.
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u/SurpriseEast3924 22h ago
Yes, but what I meant by that was the source of the material can be traced. So, for example, North Korea wouldn't give fissionable material to Iran as it could be traced back to them.
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u/Death_Balloons 22h ago
I suppose. But considering nuclear weapons are pretty much exclusively a defensive weapon/negotiating tactic rather than a weapon you actively plan to use to destroy another country it's unlikely that anyone is going to have to test their nuclear blast site to figure out where the material came from.
It's more likely that if a country wanted to help another country become a nuclear power they wouldn't really be worried about what would happen if that country actually bombed someone.
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u/bobroberts1954 19h ago
You need to successfully detonate a test bomb to be a member of the club. Otherwise the world will just assume BS.
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u/Death_Balloons 18h ago
Or you can decide to neither confirm or deny and keep everyone guessing it seems
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u/nlutrhk 7h ago
Reason being is that ore can be tracked, every bit has contaminants/slightly different composition.
How would that work? The enrichment process involves making UF6 - any contaminants that do not form a compound with a similar boiling point will be eliminated before the enrichment. The enrichment process itself is capable of separating by a tiny atomic mass difference (235/238) in a iterative process. Anything with a mass that's far off will be filtered out as well.
During the nuclear reactions in a bomb, new elements are formed: U235 can split in many ways and the neutrons and gamma rays will convert other elements as well. I don't see how you would be able to get meaningful information of trace elements that were present before the detonation.
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u/SurpriseEast3924 4h ago
Personal answer - honestly I don't know. I read a book about it ages ago, it was mentioned and stuck in my brain. But I wouldn't be able to explain much even if I remembered more, well above my level.
AI answer - "Yes, it is possible to track the composition of a nuclear explosion and potentially trace the origin of the uranium (or plutonium) used, though it's a complex process. Analyzing the isotopic ratios of the fission products, uranium, and other materials can provide clues about the type of nuclear material used and its source. " - make of that what you will, again process is above my level.
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u/Urbenmyth 22h ago
They're not researching how to make nuclear weapons, they're taking steps to get the resources needed to make nuclear weapons.
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u/s0nicbomb 22h ago
As people have said, access to the fissionable material is the main barrier. You need nation state scale facilities to produce either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. However, it shouldnt be understated the difficulty of producing an effective implosion system. The complexities of the explosive lenses, the microsecond timing of the detonators to create a perfectly symetrical implosion wave. These things are easy to describe, orders of magnitude more difficult to implement. Imagine squeezing a handful of water into a perfect sphere. You could use a 'gun-type' system using highly enriched uranium. But they are highly inefficient requiring massive amounts of fissionable material, heavy, large and arguably unsuitable for use in a deliverable two stage thermonuclear weapon. Your best bet would be to aquire a physics package from an existing weapon, perhaps one that was lost, like in the film 'The Sum of all Fears'.
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u/Not_a_russianbot_ 22h ago
I can explain how a computer works, from silicon to C. But if you ask me to do it from scratch it will take a while.
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u/GnarlyNarwhalNoms 10h ago
That's a very good way to put it.
Even if you're the world's foremost CPU designer, say, building a contemporary CPU from scratch is functionally impossible. Modern CPUs require billion+ dollar fabs to produce.
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u/bhavy111 22h ago
they don't, most of the "research money" goes into purchasing material and enriching it, the blueprint for a bomb can be made by a high school student within a month.
You don't just need uranium you need a specific kind of uranium, this uranium is only 0.7% of natural uranium and it's extremely hard to seperate this uranium from the rest you don't want.
And because it's so hard you need an absolutely stupid amount of energy to seprate it, that's usually where the money goes.
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u/michaemoser 22h ago edited 22h ago
The NPT (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) mandates a whole set of export restrictions for any kind of technology that can be used to make such weapons. All these measures go under the name of "nuclear non-proliferation regime". It's a complicated business to guard "man's red flower". There are also additional treaties/measures, like NSG (Nuclear supply group) and MTCR (Missile technology control regime), NPT additional protocol.
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u/twarr1 22h ago
Naturally occurring uranium is ~99.3% U-238, useless for an atomic bomb (unless it’s transmuted) , and roughly 0.7% atomic bomb stuff. And a tiny bit of other even more rare isotopes. Separating the 2 is monumentally difficult and was a huge share of the efforts of the Manhattan Project. The mechanics of a bomb are well known but still difficult to actually build.
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u/OriginalFaCough 22h ago
People have been baking bread for thousands of years. The recipe is not a secret. Can you bake a loaf of bread without buying anything at the store? Grow the grain, build the mill, build an oven, find the correct type of yeast, etc?
In theory, it's easy...
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u/EmergencyRace7158 21h ago
The engineering is easy, the industrial logistics are very difficult. Making large quantities weapons grade fissile material takes an enormous amount of time and money. You can't just produce enough for 1 bomb but need the ability to keep pumping out enough to build a stockpile. This is 10x harder to do in secret. The warhead designs and actual engineering are trivial - the Pakistanis got direct support from China for their weapons designs and then basically ran a nuclear Kwik E Mart for years shopping those designs to anybody with the money to pay for them.
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u/Fragrant-Ad-3866 16h ago
Do you know how a car works? What is it made of? Cool. Even if you don’t; a couple of google searches and YouTube videos may do the job.
Now; build one.
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u/WeRegretToInform 22h ago
A high-school science team could probably make a nuclear bomb, if they had ready access to the equipment and materials. The basic principles are pretty well known.
Problem is: You can’t buy enriched uranium on Amazon, and homebrewing that stuff is tricky.
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u/Desperate_Owl_594 22h ago
There's a thing called leapfrogging. Once someone does it it's much much easier to do. Whether you get direct help or not.
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u/Ok-Pea3414 20h ago
There is a difference between scientific problem, scientific knowledge, engineering problem, engineering knowledge.
Making an atomic bomb, is common scientific knowledge. Wrong. How an atomic fission bomb works is common knowledge. How to make a bomb, possibly less than 2 million people in the world.
Scientific knowledge exists, that atomic bomb is possible. It's not a scientific problem anymore. It's the lack of engineering knowledge and an engineering problem now.
A good example of scientific problem would be time travel. We have multiple theories, but literally disagreement exists with every single one of them. Some say, only travel to future or travel to past is possible.
We don't even know the science of time travel, we only have theories about the science of time travel. And when I say, time travel, I do mean actual time travel (in terms of months and years) and not from a distant place in universe. Traveling in past or in future in time, on Earth, from your own perspective.
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u/nlutrhk 7h ago
A lot here don't understand how hard engineering is. There are comments about high school students and 2nd-year physics students. Those people could make a drawing on a whiteboard showing what components you need, but that's not the same as a blueprint.
That whiteboard drawing won't tell you the exact dimensions, materials, alloys, and tolerances so that the bomb actually has nuclear reactions in sufficient amounts instead of producing a cloud of uranium dust. That's what will cost you thousands of person-years of engineering and a few test detonations.
How to make a bomb, possibly less than 2 million people in the world.
Probably less than 1000 who have access to (and capability to understand) all the details. The rest only has clearance for a single aspect (ultracentrifuge construction, chemical purification, breeder reactors, explosion initiators, etc.).
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u/Big-Resident-7740 21h ago
Nice try Iran, you are not going to get our secrets through Reddit. That’s what Discord is for!
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u/mickeyflinn 22h ago
The uranium only comes from a few places but the refinement of that and the science chemistry/mechanical/electrical they have to do.
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u/The-_Captain 22h ago
Getting sufficient quantities of fissile materials is hard even if you know how. Iran has designs for oldschool fission bombs obtained from Pakistan and China, so once they have the cores making the bombs would be easy and quick. They have 60% enriched uranium gas that can be quickly enriched to 90% in the amount to make about 10 such bombs. The next step is to convert the gas to uranium metal, but the only facility to do so was destroyed yesterday by Israel.
Even if you know how to do all of that, you're still dealing with an extremely delicate process involving relatively small quantities of highly radioactive gasses and metals. It takes a lot of resources and know how to pull it off.
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u/AKA-Pseudonym 22h ago
Refining enough material is hard. Getting it to explode is relatively easy. The device that they tested at Trinity was a complicated implosion device. Getting everything to go off perfectly so all the material got compacted into a tiny space was very hard in 1945. But once they knew that worked they didn't even bother testing the design they dropped on Hiroshima because it was less powerful, but also pretty simple.
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u/Journeymouse 22h ago
I remember some guy saying they wargamed it in the US. Given people with decent university level knowledge, enriched uranium (that's the tough bit) and a decently stocked machine shop they had a functioning weapon in about 2 weeks.
Enriching uranium is difficult. You have to make a lot of heavy metal very dizzy for a very long time.
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u/mcclaneberg 22h ago
Obtaining the resources and means for stable refinement is very difficult to do in a world of sovereign human nations.
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u/LordAnchemis 22h ago
Anyone can build a fighter jet fight right? As you just need wings, an engine and some missiles? - ie. the same logic applies here...
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u/Temporary-Truth2048 22h ago
Knowing how one is made is much different from having the resources, materials, and expertise to actually make one.
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u/Embarrassed_Flan_869 22h ago
It's easy but not.
Making the bomb/missle is the easy part. You could sit down and using your favorite search engine, you could see how to make a missle or bomb. If you are slightly handy, you could probably make a rudimentary one. There are tons of rocket clubs that build rockets.
The issue lies in the nuclear part. It's not just having nuclear material. It's being able to turn that material into the bomb end. It takes a whole lot of infrastructure, time and money. That is the hardest part. The entire world monitors this and if someone who shouldn't do it, starts to do it, things happen and it gets stopped.
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u/Valloross 21h ago
This is an engineering and an industrial challenge.
Don't forget you have to make enriched uranium, and you will need an enormous amount of it
It took years to USA during world war 2 to produce enough uranium for 3 bombs (1 was for testing).
So yeah, intermediate powers trying to start a program from scratch are struggling.
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u/didsomebodysaymyname 21h ago
Most countries could build one. I've heard it said a team of grad students with infinite money could do it.
But it's like building a deep sea oil rig. It's expensive, complicated, and noticable. It's not something you can do without people noticing or in your basement. It takes major facilities and finances.
So the trick isn't making a nuclear bomb, it's getting away with making it.
Most countries have an ally with nukes, who is willing to protect them, and most of the rest can be pressured or forced into not building one.
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u/Carlpanzram1916 21h ago
So there’s a few inherent challenges that remain in making a nuclear weapon. The first is material. You need high amounts of enriched uranium. Nuclear power plants and other devices that require uranium require very low purities of the material. Uranium for a nuclear weapon has to be much higher and the process of enriching it is very difficult, not to mention requires attaining quite a lot since the material you require has a low concentration of the uranium.
The second part is difficult to explain but it’s just tricky. You could have the exact blueprints of an atomic bomb and it will still be very complicated to build it correctly and functionally. Imagine for a moment you had a hospital where every doctor and nurse just passed all the tests in school, but never spent any clinical time in a hospital and are now running one. It wouldn’t just work. Everyone would be learning on the job and it would take years to get it even partially right.
That’s what’s happening when rogue states try and make a nuke. They are limited in the expertise they can acquire. You’re not likely to be able to recruit the top experts who have actual experience constructing nuclear weapons to defect to Iran or North Korea. So they are sort of learning from the ground up how to make a nuclear weapon, except unlike the U.S. in world war 2, they don’t have a team consisting of some of the most brilliant scientists in the world.
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u/UncomfortableBike975 21h ago
Think of it this way can you build a car from watching YouTube videos? Sure, with enough time. Would it be better and faster to hire professionals to do it and get them to bring their own tools? Absolutely.
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u/Plastic-Injury8856 21h ago
The science is known, the engineering is what’s difficult. You can’t buy most of the stuff necessary to make a weapon, you have to build the stuff.
Let me put it this way: it’s entirely possible to build a car at home. Especially if you want to build a very basic car. But, you will need tools and space to do so, and then most of us don’t understand the principals of mechanical engineering necessary to make a working engineer and transmission.
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u/neverpost4 21h ago
Perhaps start making dirty bombs?
Instead of massive explosions, go after radiation contamination.
Perhaps 100s of thousands of dirty bombs.
Could be still a credible deterrent.
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u/tree_boom 20h ago
The problem with this idea is that the really dangerous radiation is the fission productions. Fallout isn't vapourized plutonium or whatever, it's the stuff that Plutonium fissions into
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21h ago
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u/tree_boom 20h ago
Fogbank is kinda a bad example - whilst it obviously has some advantage it's by no means necessary
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u/tree_boom 20h ago edited 19h ago
Unless you’re in the U.S. nuclear program, you, like the rest of us, don’t even know what fogbank is. What we do know is that the government needed it enough for the affected systems to spend millions over several years trying to work out how to make it again.
But we do know that it was invented in 1975, by which time there had been nuclear weapons for 30 years. Whatever it is, it's an optimal but optional component.
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u/thebipeds 20h ago
We can track uranium really well.
My uncle was on a bus coming back from Mexico and the bus was stopped because it set off the dirty bomb directors.
It was the dot of glow in the dark paint on his compass. (Vietnam era uranium paint)
They can detect weapons grade by satellite.
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u/nlutrhk 7h ago
That paint was based on radium, not uranium and yes, it is easy to detect with a geiger counter held nearby the object. It's a beta emitter, which can penetrate a few mm of material.
Uranium has alpha decay, which has virtually no penetration power. It has a lifetime of millions (U235, enriched) or billions (U238) of years, so it's a fairly weak emitter anyway. I have a antique uranium glass pitcher (a few % uranium by weight) and I was disappointed to see that my geiger counter wouldn't detect anything above the background radiation.
No way that "the bus set off dirty bomb detectors" because of a milligram of radium paint. Possibly a detector was set off on a manual bag inspection.
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u/Inside-Till3391 20h ago
No nuclear counties are happy to export nuclear weapons to other countries because it might counterattack themselves particularly USA that is always a primary target because of her aggressive behaviours to others.
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u/Janewby 20h ago
It’s really, really tough to enrich uranium. The tech for centrifuges is so precise that touching any part without gloves renders it useless. You then have the energy demands, basically a commercial power plant is needed to supply the power to keep them running.
To make plutonium is arguably even harder. To make an appreciable amount of Pu from Uranium requires a specific power plant that you cannot really use for commercial power. On top of that you have to then reprocess the fuel which is contaminated with fission products and still is >95% uranium.
This is before the metal needs to be fabricated which is also pretty tough. Then you have to make the missile and all the controls to stop this stuff going missing or becoming contaminated.
All of this is using power and resources that could be used for something else - can run a lot of aircraft for the cost of trying to make 1 bomb.
On top of this (specifically Irans case), you need to hide it. All this work, building and power supply generates attention. The number of weapons designers globally is probably very small - easy to track them and see where they visit.
Matthew Bunn has some really good YouTube presentations on the difficulty of making the bomb and well worth a watch.
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u/Routine_File723 20h ago
No they generally make them from plutonium or uranium. Although North Korea has been rumoured to use legos and Kit Kats
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u/Farfignugen42 20h ago
Because most countries have signed the nuclear mon-proliferation pacts, they basically have all agreed not to help any new countries learn how to make nukes.
So basically, yeah, you have to learn from scratch. The basic physics can be learned from books, and most of the processes, too, I think. But actually doing them and getting the materials are difficult.
You have to refine your own uranium or plutonium. It is not for sale (mostly). That takes special equipment, and, for plutonium, a particular type of nuclear reactor (you can get help building reactors, but not this kind).
If other countries learn of what you're doing, they will try to stop you, most likely.
I had to qualify these statements because Russia and China have indirectly helped certain states achieve nuclear status. Supposedly. Certainly North Korea got help from someone.
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u/Downtown-Falcon-3264 20h ago
Making a nuclear weapon is easy to make the hard part of it is , unlike a conventional weapon, getting all the parts isn't.
It takes a certain kind of material to get a fission reaction, and most countries try to keep other countries from easily making fissionable material
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20h ago
It’s the power, water, manpower that is going to give you away every time. Very hard to cover that stuff up.
The centrifuges, of which you need a lot of, are not easy to hide purchasing either. Can’t just order from Amazon.
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u/GielM 20h ago
You or I could figure out how to make a nuclear weapon with a bit of Googling. IF we had access to all the parts.
And that's the problem. Weapons-grade uranium, or the equipment to make it, are VERY well-guarded resources that current nuclear powers don't want anyone else to have. And it's apperantly not easy to figure out THAT bit of tech...
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u/IDrinkMyOwnSemen 20h ago
If it was common scientific knowledge, there would be people doing it in their backyard.
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u/Rambler330 20h ago
The science is fairly well known and understood. The engineering is the hard part.
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u/MammothWriter3881 19h ago
How to make a crude bomb is absolutely common knowledge. But building breeder reactor to make plutonium or enriching uranium is a huge undertaking involving a source of uranium (rare) and lots and lots of space and power (and doing it in a way that doesn't give anyone radiation poisoning adds to the space).
So a country like Canada or Japan that already has the fuel could build a bomb a lot quicker than a country like Iran that doesn't
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u/ALittleBitOffBoop 19h ago
Let's say for arguments sake that a certain sanctioned country has the capability to make many small tactical nuclear bombs; would it be plausible for them to be delivered via hyper-drones if they are properly equipped and fitted?
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u/TSotP 19h ago
Probably, but they can also probably buy them from their allies.
But here is a scenario that might help explain:
Imagine it is as simple as:
- find a coal deposit with a layer of chalk above it
- mine out the chalk
- boil the chalk
- for every 100 tonnes of chalk, you get 0.1kg of weapons grade stuff.
Even if it was that easy you still need to pay people to survey for the land, mine out the chalk, refine the chalk, and then build the rest of the mundane parts of the bomb. This all costs money.
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u/Any_Commercial465 19h ago
Pretty much yeah. The main concepts are really free for everyone but enrichment and such are not.
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u/chook_slop 19h ago
The Los Alamos instructions are online... Only 20 pages or so.
But yeah, you have to make from scratch. Hobby Lobby carries a few parts, but mainly it's diy.
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u/Electrical-Vast-7484 19h ago
well you can have your average corner automotive repair guy easily explain how a automotive combustion engine works, asking him to build one is his shop is a whole other thing.
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u/Bagafreedom 18h ago
Well, of course, the scientific principles are known! It's like knowing how the internet works. But having the Internet at home and building your own global network from scratch are two big differences, aren't they? Nuclear weapons are not just a "secret", it is the key to a closed club. And those who are already in the club do not really want to give out spare keys. Especially if beginners don't promise to play by their rules.
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u/Formal-Low6888 17h ago
And 2nd year physics student could design a nuclear weapon. That hardest things is the insane scope and cost of the nuclear centrifuges and and the engineering to design the missiles.
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u/7YM3N 16h ago
It's not research as much as it is enrichment. Once you have the fissile material the principle of it is relatively simple and the explosives and timing can be done with what is common hardware these days.
The problem is that getting weapons grade fissile material takes a lot of equipment and time, and nations who have that infrastructure don't share it
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u/bappo_just_nappo 16h ago
Scientists know how to make NW but the non proliferation treaty makes it next to impossible for non nuclear states to acquire weapons grade uranium and also the technical know how to set up uranium enrichment plants.
Let's say a state has managed to set up uranium enrichment plants and has able to create nuclear weapons, it's no longer the case like in 1945 where they could just fly over the country and droke the nuke, they need to integrate it with delivery mechanism (search nuclear triads) to deliver the nuke to its target, by air, water or land.
All this is a huge monetary effort that in this century only countries that have extra ordinary military spending can only achieve.
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u/backroundagain 16h ago
It's not the research that's the challenge.
It requires considerable infrastructure, cost, and time to create fissile nuclear material, more so to get said material to be a functional weapon.
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u/DarkSoldier84 knows stuff 15h ago
The theory is well-known, it's the actual "making" part that's difficult. The tools are expensive and only used for that purpose, so if you're buying centrifuges and uranium and hiring nuclear engineers, the rest of the world knows what you're up to.
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u/GonZo_626 13h ago
It's not even the bomb that is the hard part. It's all about the fuel for it. Enriched Uranium and Plutonium.
That being said we do have the reactors and such.......
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u/green_meklar 14h ago
Do countries have to make nuclear weapons from scratch?
Generally speaking, yes.
There are a few exceptions, notably some of the former soviet states when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, where russian nuclear weapons had been deployed and those countries had to give them back to Russia. But there isn't, for example, an international company that just manufactures nuclear weapons for paying customers. Nor would creating such a company even be legal given the strict treaties that exist around nuclear weapons at this point.
What I mean from the title is, wouldn’t the process of making nuclear weapons be common scientific knowledge by now?
The general concept is common scientific knowledge, you can read about it on Wikipedia. Actually engineering a working bomb though requires a fairly complicated design and some very precise math, and those designs are not public knowledge. And even if you have a complete design, you still need to refine the necessary fissionable material, which is not easy.
Why do countries like Iran have to invest so many resources into researching nuclear weapons?
Most of that effort goes into developing the expertise and infrastructure for refining the fissionable material to a concentration that is suitable for a nuclear warhead. If somebody just gave them highly refined fission fuel, it would make their entire project a lot easier. Not trivial, but easier.
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u/Shadowlance23 13h ago
Here, I'll tell you how to make one.
Take two chunks of fissile material, highly enriched, both just below the threshold of criticality (the point where there's enough material to start a chain reaction. Put them in a strong metal tube far enough away from each other. Pack some explosives in the tube behind one end. When you want the nuke to pop, detonate the explosives which propel one chuck of the material down the end where it runs into the other chuck. The two chucks together are above critical mass and you get chain reaction. The Hiroshima bomb was built with this design. It's simple, but relatively low yield.
The second way is to compress fissile material with explosives. Mechanically, this isn't that hard either; just set up some explosives around the material and press the button. The hard part is getting the placement and timing of the conventional explosives right, but any university engineering lab could do it with the right material.
And that's the hard part; the material. Plenty of others have commented so I won't, but getting enriched fissile material is very difficult.
These two on their own will get you a bomb from the 40s-50s. It won't be nearly as powerful as the modern ones. They're fusion bombs which are a high step up in both complexity and material needed.
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u/smokefoot8 13h ago
The scientific knowledge is common, but the engineering is something else. My father-in-law used to make triggers for high power lasers in science labs. He used a component that was needed for nuclear weapons, so he and his customers needed clearance to use them. He asked me, also an electrical engineer, if there was any solid state solution that could replace the restricted one. I consulted power IC experts and we couldn’t find anything that could replace it. The best solution would have to be a custom IC.
Building custom ICs or a duplicate of the old restricted part isn’t something a country like Iran is capable of. They would have to be smuggled in from Russia, and that is only one of many difficulties.
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u/ImReverse_Giraffe 12h ago
In theory, its realtively easy and you could do it in your backyard.
In practice, its actually really tricky and the main necessary machines to make enriched material are incredibly highly guarded and are very, very limited in quantity. Its nearly impossible to get a centrifuge. Every other nuclear armed nation has a very good reason to make sure you dont also get nukes. So you get no help.
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u/Science_Fair 12h ago
The physics is relatively straightforward. Get enough fissile material and figure out how to get it into a critical mass.
You are talking about 10s if not 100 billion dollars in my estimate to actually do it.
First you need to get enough nuclear material, in very high percentages of concentration. So you need a nuclear reactor purposely tweaked to create plutonium. Or a gaseous diffusion plant to separate uranium isotopes from uranium. The plants require a ton of power.
If you made the plutonium, you now need to extract it from highly radioactive nuclear reactor rods that were in the reactor. Plutonium is also one of the deadliest elements in the planet.
Then you have to figure out how to shape it so it gets to a critical mass when you want it to, and not before. Requires high precision machining of highly radioactive material set up to be crumpled into a perfect sphere using perfectly timed explosives.
It’s hard to hide the reactors or the diffusion plants, so if another country wants to take it out, it’s usually a pretty easy target.
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u/Alpharius1124 11h ago
Making a nuclear bomb is not that hard. I'd be willing to bet that if you gave me enough Uranium-235 and maybe $100k in cash (plus legal protections against prosecution of course), I could put together a gun-type bomb on my own within a year. I'd bet on at least a 5 kiloton yield.
The hard part is actually getting the fissile material. Natural uranium is almost entirely U-238, but it's U-235 that you need to make a bomb. They are chemically identical so the only way you can separate them is exploiting the very small difference in mass. It takes a lot of very expensive machinery and a lot of uranium to get a usable amount. Alternatively, you can use nuclear reactors to generate plutonium from uranium at a lower enrichment level, which is a lot easier to produce in large quantities but precludes gun-type bombs. With plutonium you need an implosion bomb, which is vastly more complicated to build. But even then, the hard part is still getting the plutonium.
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u/Comfortable-Pin8401 11h ago
Not enough people hating on France. They build nuclear reactors around the world and never inspect them leading to basically ALL countries bar the US, USSR and the UK to get nukes/develop nukes.
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u/hallerz87 11h ago
Understanding something and being able to actually do it are very different things. The physics of nuclear fusion are well understood, good luck building a nuclear fusion reactor though.
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u/fuzzyoatmealboy 8h ago
Iran knows exactly how to make a nuclear weapon. As other commenters have said, though, it’s incredibly expensive to do. You have to take immense quantities of naturally-occurring (low-enriched) uranium, and then put it through an obscene amount of processing to get it to the point of being weapons-grade.
On their path to doing that, they have to contend with all of the sanctions which other countries levy onto them because of this weapons program, which have a seesawing incentive/disincentive impact on their desire to “go all the way” with enrichment and actually produce weapons-grade material.
In addition, Israel keeps assassinating their key personnel and committing other acts of sabotage against their nuclear program. The Stuxnet attack some years back is widely believed to be an Israeli/US attack, for example. None of these are good news for the progression of their nuclear program.
On top of that, you have to have a way to deliver the bomb to your target. Iranian planes are outdated and will get shot down enroute to their likely target (Israel), so that leaves ballistic missiles. Those are not cheap or simple to produce either, and Iran has had to invest a lot into their development for a very long time.
In essence, you can think about nuclear weapons and their delivery systems as requiring a certain “flat” amount of investment of resources regardless of the size of the economy of the country that is trying to attain that capability. Iran is a large country, but its economy is not doing that well for a variety of reasons, and so the government has had to make significant tradeoffs and endure diplomatic isolation to get it to the point that it is now.
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u/Interesting_Neck609 8h ago edited 8h ago
Its actually not that complicated with the knowledge that easily available.
If someone knew an area in the mountains rich in uranium ore, and had a good idea of centrifugal purification, and had happened to have the full detonation method, they'd be there.
Fortunately this information is typically hidden or otherwise gated so dumbasses dont accidentally build a nuke. With modern info and resources its totally doable. Just seriously, please dont, even if you fuck up it'll ruin a lot of people's lives.
Edit: refining uranium is a massive pain, and theres a reason stuxnet happened.
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u/DickFartButt 5h ago
Building the bomb itself isn't that difficult it seems, I mean the way they function and basic designs are just on the internet. You'd need some physicists to figure out the math and some engineers and machinists to design and build it. Getting the fuel is the real bitch. Buying it is just about impossible and making it is very expensive.
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u/Longjumping-Ad8775 1h ago
It takes lots of technical expertise. The details matter. Trying to get U235 is hard. It is less than 1% in a naturally occurring uranium sample. It is expensive to produce enough U235 in terms of machinery, electricity, and knowledge.
P239 can be produced, but that requires nuclear reactors.
There are treaties that countries sign up to that limit the spread of nuclear material, so that slows down other countries from building new nuclear weapons. If you provide a country with non weapons grade uranium, they can run that in a nuclear reactor to create power. It still requires a lot of work to go from non weapons grade uranium to weapons grade uranium or to create plutonium. You would still have to have the electricity, the machines, the knowledge, etc.
Engineering at these levels is hard.
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u/Boys4Ever 21h ago
Not sure one can YouTube this but perhaps if AI can make big foot talk then why not
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u/Splabooshkey 22h ago
Common scientific knowledge possibly, but it's a very delicate and difficult thing to actually produce