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
The actual act of constructing a nuclear weapon, with current day technology, isnt that hard if you happened to have enough weapons grade plutonium or uranium around to do it.
Producing weapons grade plutonium or weapons grade highly enriched uranium is both difficult, and an enourmous industrial undertaking that is pretty much impossible to hide from the world. In the case of uranium you have to produce (for the most common method) an enourmous industrial scale cascade of very very precise, extremely power hungry centrifuges to separate the two naturally ocurring isotopes of uranium from each other. The amount of power involved in running these plants is about the same as that of a small city, and the amount of space they take up is enourmous.
In the case of producing weapons grade plutonium, you need a nuclear reactor which is capable of having u-238 exposed to it for very small amounts of time (a month roughly), then have that u-238 pulled back out, the plutonium chemically separated from it, … That is really only possible with a small set of designs of nuclear reactor, AS WELL AS having a full nuclear spent fuel reprocessing facility. Countries that have any of those things are watched by the international community veeeeeery carefully. You could not, for example, do this using any of the commercial power reactors that are operating in the US today.
Latest Answers