I’m assuming the science of making one is out there. Why then countries like Iran who so want to develop atomic weapons haven’t been able to do so?
In: Physics
There’s a few specific components that are difficult. I’m mainly going to talk about Uranium based weapons here but just know plutonium has the same issues
1. Uranium is rare and expansive but obtainable, but this can make it more difficult to obtain as other countries can restrict access to it. What is even rarer is U-235(or other isotopes) as it’s not even ordinary Uranium, it’s a much rarer isotope. The only way to get this is to make uranium into a gas then spin it around in a centrifuge which produces a very small amount very slowly. The issue with the his now is that to produce even one weapon it takes an absolutely massive number of these centrifuges and supporting infrastructure, which is expensive, time consuming to build, and impossible to hide.
2. Delivery vehicle. Congrats. You have the bomb, chances are everyone knows you have the bomb, also if the bomb isn’t delivered via a rocket or incredibly fast and stealth aircraft it either won’t make it to its target or the agent delivering will also die(so good luck getting enough people willing and able to do this). So if you have a nuclear program, you also need a program to build long range and accurate rockets, stealth bombs, or submarines that can launch rockets. So basically you need an additional program building some of the hardest vehicles ever constructed
Those two are the biggest, but there’s also factors including the general production, designing proper timers, knowing that you need to build multiple all at once(if only a couple people could attack you), building infrastructure to test it, ect
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