What is so difficult about developing nuclear weapons that makes some countries incapable of making them?
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The main barrier, today, for countries getting nuclear weapons is that there are lots of treaties and agreements that are designed to stop them from doing it. All of the countries in these treaties and agreements have entered into the voluntarily. So it is chiefly a political issue, not a technical one. It is possible for countries to leave these treaties (like North Korea did), but that comes with political and economic costs, and potentially the threat of being attacked or destabilized by other nations.
But for those that might be under these agreements and want to secretly work on a program (like, say, Iran), these agreements make it hard to do so without being detected. Whether that has political implications or not (and what they are or might be) depends on the situation, but that’s the deterrent from trying to do it — getting caught, and then having to deal with whatever happens next. Additionally, these treaties and so on are meant to make it hard to do certain “risky” activities.
That being said, making credible, usable nuclear weapons is still technically challenging and very expensive. It is, however, decades-old technology, and a lot easier in some areas than it used to be.
You can think of there as being two technical challenges. One is making the warheads themselves. This involves making fissile material fuel (enriched uranium or plutonium) in large quantities, both of which require a lot of work and the development of specialized facilities like centrifuge factories or nuclear reactors. This is today quite hard to do secretly. Once you have the fuel, you then have to design and produce actual weapons, but this is not nearly as hard as it was 80 years ago. The basic science has been declassified for a long time, and the tools for designing and manufacturing these kinds of devices are much more common and powerful than they ever were in the past.
The other challenge is having a credible means of “delivery”: being able to credibly threaten to be able to get the weapon from wherever you are to wherever your imagined enemy is without them shooting it down, capturing it, having it miss, etc. So this involves things like missile programs, submarine programs, maybe even bomber programs, though in the present day, depending on who your imagined enemy is, their capabilities for neutralizing a very crude threat have increased. Making a missile that can reliably hit a target on the other side of the world is still pretty difficult unless you are a country that already has a lot of experience with missiles or rockets. Historically, this kind of work has been _much_ harder than the warheads, and cost _much_ more to develop and maintain. They aren’t as flashy and exciting as the warheads themselves, so they tend to get overlooked, but just having a warhead is not enough to have a credible nuclear threat.
Again, the issue here is not that this is stuff that is truly “secret.” But it is very specialized technical knowledge and production that you cannot just pick up off the shelf. So for a “poor” nation, you are talking about them creating an entire industry from scratch to make all of this stuff, along with training the people to work in it, all while some other “rich” nation is likely trying to stop you in various ways (whether economic sanctions, political pressure, assassinating your scientists, etc.). So that’s difficult.
If we are talking about a “rich” nation that already has some pieces of this puzzle, either because they have a robust domestic nuclear energy industry or a space program (or both), then it isn’t all that hard. A nation like Japan could “go nuclear” very quickly in a technical sense if it wanted to and nobody tried to stop it (internationally or domestically).
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