What is so difficult about developing nuclear weapons that makes some countries incapable of making them?

339 views

What is so difficult about developing nuclear weapons that makes some countries incapable of making them?

In: 1394

20 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

You are viewing 1 out of 20 answers, click here to view all answers.