eli5: Why can’t countries that want to build Nukes build Nukes? Especially since several countries built them, some 75+ years ago
In: Engineering
A few reasons. One, its very difficult from a technical and engineering perspective. You will need testing and practice in order to gain the knowledge and experience necessary to reliably manufacture nuclear warheads. That leads into the second problem is that it’s very time and labor intensive to acquire and enrich the necessary Uranium. It’s a big undertaking logistically just to get that part done, which is the part that hangs up a lot of countries. Thirdly you are now responsible for a bunch of nuclear weapons that require their own security and delivery specialties. This is not necessarily something that every country wants to deal with. Especially when most countries will not realistically find themselves in a situation where they need an all-or-nothing weapon like that. A nuclear weapon is primarily a defensive deterrent weapon, and so it is valuable for countries feeling at risk of being overrun as a last ditch effort. The vast majority of countries do not find themselves in this situation, so the only countries willing to put in the time and effort are either very rich or very afraid.
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