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
I don’t know for a fact but I imagine there’s huge restrictions on obtaining the chemicals needed to produce them
Making one is not difficult
Obtaining the materials, building the facility, and testing part are the hard things
Once you try to build one, the US, Russia, Chinese, and other major power will have their eyes on you
What happen after will heavily depends on your relationship with those countries. You might be straight up invaded and having your government toppled
I’m sure someone with more knowledge will be along to provide a better answer, but…
Designing the enclosure, primary explosives, and firing mechanism for a nuclear bomb are (relatively) easy. The way they work is reasonably well understood at a conceptual level.
Refining enough fissile material when access to the ingredients is tightly controlled by nuclear-armed countries who want to remain the only nuclear-armed countries… now that’s the tough part.
Okay so you know how sometimes you watch a YouTube video showing you exactly how to tie a tie but you still duck up?
Now imagine you have a paper box full of books explaining how to manufacture a nuclear bomb.
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.
The hardware to enrichment of uranium is very precise, delicate and unforgiving. Iranian plant was destroyed by a virus that mess with the velocity of the centrifuges.
Even with today’s access to information and technology it is far from easy.
We can see that in the case of Iran: just to get enough enriched Uranium they had to build a whole factory full of ultra-highly powered centrifuges. And most likely they still don’t have enough of the right stuff to proceed (several sabotage acts by whoever also didn’t help, of course).
And that is only the start – expect a massive research project before you even get close to an actual bomb.
Producing nuclear weapon requires very talented, well educated intelligent people. If an individual is intelligent, talented and highly educated he won’t stay in a country like Iran. Even if he can’t leave the country for other reasons, he won’t help the regime.
So there is an irony here.
In Iran, intelligent, educated talented people do not help the government to produce mass destruction weapons. But individuals with same qualities help their government produce mass destruction weapons if the developed world.
The difficulty is making bomb grade Uranium or Plutonium. 99.3% of Uranium is non boom making Uranium-238 and only 0.7% is boom making Uranium-235.
Because they are both Uranium, getting rid of the non-boom making Uranium-238 is REALLY REALLY hard. Basically the modern way is making the uranium into a gas and spinning it REALLY REALLY fast. Uranium-238 being a bit more heavy goes more to the outside than U235. This means that the Uranium gas in the middle has slightly more Uranium 235. So after 1 centrifuge you are left with 99.25% Non-BOOM and 0.75% BOOM Uranium. You repeat the process until your Uranium is mostly BOOM Uranium.
The machines to do that need to be very very very very precise because they have to spin very very very fast. Each very makes it that much harder to do.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium)
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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