How were 2 countries able to discover and build nuclear weapons from scratch, simultaneously during the 1940s but most countries today can’t build them without decades of effort?
In: Physics
Building nukes is not actually all that technically difficult when you know the basics of how it is done.
Almost any developed country could build their own nuke if they wanted too. The problem is that it would hard to do so without tipping anyone of and the countries who already have nukes don’t want anyone else to join the club and that the people in many countries might not support such an endeavour.
If you look at for example Japan and Germany, there is little doubt that they could have a working nuke in relatively short time based on the technical challenge alone. However there would be huge resistance to the idea from both the people in those countries as well as the rest of the world if they tried.
Building the sort of infrastructure that gets you the raw materials to make a bomb with is hard to hide and for the most part dependent on imports.
Considering their limited usefulness for anything other than acting as a threat or starting a nuclear war they simply aren’t worth the trouble form most countries at this point.
You can be sure however that if one of the major current nuclear powers started actually using nukes on anyone. The number of nuclear powers would shoot up within very short order after that.
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