What is so difficult about developing nuclear weapons that makes some countries incapable of making them?
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A big part of it is the general threat from other nations. Nothing scares quite like nuclear weapons, and there’s very few reasons to make them today. What do you think the military of other countries might do on hearing news of a new country making nuclear weapons?
As for the actual production, it requires expertise and the right equipment to refine the radioactive materials and build your bombs. It’s not something to be taken lightly, since exposure to radiation and the risk of an accident (even one that doesn’t result in a BOOM) are highly dangerous.
And finally you got the delivery system. You need a way to actually get the bomb where you want it to blow up. Having a bomb sit on your own soil isn’t what you want to do with it. So you need some kind of missile system that can travel great distances and be aimed well enough. In 1945 the bombs dropped on Japan were delivered by planes that dropped them and then ran like hell. That’s not a great strategy, so you gotta do something better. And that requires some decent sophistication from your military.
Getting enough U-235 or plutonium together to make one. A gun-type device is fairly straightforward and dumb as a rock, even if it “just” levels a moderate sized city instead of flattening a 40km circle like the fancier setups. However the centrifuges for isotope separation are very expensive and very high tech – so, they aren’t sold in the Snap-On catalog and you can’t just stick one together with washing machine parts. They are purchased from a handful of companies in the US, Russia or Europe, and such purchases tend to make all the intelligence agencies go hmmmmmmm.
Nuclear weapon development is a complex and challenging process that needs a lot of resources, knowledge, and infrastructure. To build nuclear weapons, nations must overcome a number of significant technical obstacles.
The main problem is the nuclear fuel that powers the bomb. Uranium is a fairly rare element on its own, but to make a bomb you need lots of a very rare isotope of uranium (U-235) that’s chemically identical but weighs ever so slightly less.
To separate out this rare isotope you need to turn it into a gas and spin it in a centrifuge. But this is so slow you need a gigantic factory with *thousands* of centrifuges, that consume as much electrical power as a small city.
Another fuel, plutonium, is refined differently, but it also takes a massive industrial operation to make. Either way, this is all too expensive for a small group to do, only medium and large countries can afford it.
But the even bigger problem is that all this factory infrastructure is impossible to hide. If you’re making nuclear bombs, you probably have enemies who want to stop you, and a giant factory full of delicate equipment is an easy target.
So to make a bomb, you need to be rich enough to build both a gigantic power-sucking factory *and* a military powerful enough to protect it from people who would like to stop you.
The type of uranium and/or plutonium that you need for a good explosion from a bomb is the kind that’s unstable, because although the atom’s nucleus has exactly the number of protons that make it “uranium”, it has a few “extra” neutrons in there, making it unstable.
There are many [isotopes of uranium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_uranium) (uranium with different numbers of neutrons in there), and basically if you mine the uranium ore you get a mix, and you have to extract the uranium 235 isotope from the mix. Which, it’s all uranium so it reacts chemically exactly the same, can’t use chemistry to separate it. It’s slightly heavier than the other kinds of uranium (because of a couple extra neutrons) but I mean you’re talking a minuscule difference. So you can try to separate it by centrifuge but it’s a LONG process and a very complex centrifuge device.
As the others have said, it’s also very radioactive and that makes it extremely hazardous and polluting to work with, and if you finally get enough kilos to make a bomb, then you need an ICBM or long range cruise missile to deliver it, and those aren’t easy to build either.
None of this stuff is easy to build *in secret*, the facilities are rather large, the missile flight testing is conspicuous, and so on.
And then, as a smaller country let’s say you build a few, then what? There are anti-missile defense systems, look at how many missiles and drones Ukraine is shooting down each day. If you only have “a few” they won’t get past missile defense systems. You need thousands, to overwhelm an enemy country’s defenses, to have a few actually penetrate and detonate.
It’s kinda like, a small country building ONE aircraft carrier. ONE. After years and years of enormous expenses (for a small country). What could they do with it?
You need some very specific isotopes to make a bomb that aren’t very common, and you need a lot more of them than you usually find in nature. Uranium for example is most commonly found as U-238 with a small fraction of U-235. To get enough U-235 to make a bomb you probably need the uranium you have to be made up of about 90% U-235 which is a challenge because it makes up less than a percent of natural uranium. If these were different chemically that would make things easier because you could come up with some sort of reaction to separate them but on a chemical level they are basically the same. So the process to enrich uranium instead uses centrifuges which separate them by that very tiny difference in mass (3 neutrons). This process isn’t very efficient so they end up having lots and lots of centrifuges hooked up in series to get to a useful purity. We usually need at least 3% U-235 to put into a reactor but even that level of purity is expensive and difficult so there are some reactors designed to use natural uranium instead.
Plutonium presents a different problem, essentially you need to build a uranium reactor to create the plutonium you would need for a bomb. Which means you have to deal with the headache of running a reactor and if you aren’t already a nuclear armed nation other nations are going to notice that part (and probably all the other infrastructure required) which will make them not happy with you.
There are two kinds of atomic bombs and they are each hard for their own different reasons.
1 – You can fairly easily make a “gun” style uranium bomb with enriched uranium, but enriching uranium is **very** difficult. it requires the development of a **massive** infrastructure of equipment that can take months to enrich enough uranium for a single bomb. If other nations are trying to stop you, this infrastructure is hard to hide and protect.
2 – On the other hand, it’s comparatively easy to produce plutonium in modest nuclear reactors (compared to enriching uranium), but plutonium can only be used in a much more advanced and complex “implosion” style weapon. An implosion bomb requires much more technical control in order to perfectly control the timing and shape of a spherical implosion.
**tl;dr enriching uranium is VERY hard, but a gun style bomb is fairly simple. Obtaining plutonium is comparatively easy, but building a reliable implosion bomb is VERY hard.**
Most of these answers are really spot on, I would just like to add the fact that the “principles” of nuclear weaponry are surprisingly simple, see the wikipedia articles. However, the actual construction of one is the essence of the idiom: “the devil is in the details”
Most of the countries like Mexico, Brazil or the Philippines could build a nuclear weapon in less than ten years if they want it. But there are international treaties and no geopolitical gains to do it.
Submarines and turbofans are much, much difficult to build, though.
First, I will tell you two things that are not difficult:
1. Obtaining enough uranium to make a bomb. Uranium is a fairly common element in the earth’s crust, and there are significant deposits on six continents. It is not hard to get.
2. Handling uranium’s radioactivity. Natural uranium is more than 99% U-238 (half-life of 4.5 billion years), and most of the rest is U-235 (half-life of 700 million years), plus a small trace amount of U-234 (half-life of 250,000 years). In other words, uranium is not very radioactive at all, and since its primary decay mode is alpha emission, the radiation is very easy to shield against.
Plutonium can be used in implosion weapons, but it does not occur in nature (except in absolutely miniscule trace amounts). You have to make plutonium in a nuclear reactor, which is, of course, a bit of a challenge. You also have to extract Pu-239 from the other plutonium isotopes that are produced in the reactor, which can be a challenging reactor design problem, as well as a difficult post-processing engineering problem.
The hardest part, historically, has been constructing a bomb that doesn’t weigh a ton, like gun-type weapons (important if you would like to transport the bomb to another country instead of exploding it in your own facility). It’s technically challenging to make implosion work well, and there is a lot of practical knowledge about the actual manufacture of the bombs that is hard to come by.
Well, there is one other difficult part: convincing other nations not to prevent you from developing a weapons program. It’s not easy to cover up an effective weapons program these days. The big military powers mostly don’t like other nations developing nuclear weapons, and they use a variety of techniques to prevent it from happening. Diplomacy is the most popular, but it isn’t the only option that has been used.
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