What I mean is that nuclear technology is more than 60 years old now, and I guess there is a pretty good understanding of how to build nuclear weapons, and how to make ballistic missiles. So what exactly stops countries from secretly developing them in remote facilities?
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For one plenty of nations spend a fortune on spying and espionage so there’s not a whole lot of secrets out there. You’re talking about building an actual nuclear weapon not a dirty bomb so a nation would need to enrich nuclear material. The Iranians were working on building nukes for many years, but the Americans and the Israelis did a good job of sabotaging these efforts.
So maybe a nation does produce a couple nukes and starts waving their dick on the International stage. They can’t use them, other nations would glass them. They’d wind up like North Korea, sanction to death.
The biggest barrier in building a nuclear weapon is getting the necessary fissile material. The nuclear fuel. Everything else is pretty simple by modern weapons technology standards.
This means either Uranium, which can be mined, and then refined into weapons-grade uranium, or Plutonium, which doesn’t occur naturally.
Refining Uranium involves operating hundreds of centrifuges that require a ton of electricity, and then it still takes forever. It’s something that a country could theoretically do in secret, but in practice if you start buying up a bunch of parts for building centrifuges and setting up high-voltage electricity supply to a remote facility, that’s something that intelligence agencies are going to take note of.
Getting plutonium involves operating nuclear reactors and reprocessing the fuel, and while you could, maybe, disguise a reactor used primarily for making plutonium as a civilian reactor designed for making electricity, it’s something the international inspectors would probably notice. And if you say we’re not letting in any inspectors to inspect our definitely civilian nuclear program, don’t worry, stop bothering us – you know, that’s something that intelligence agencies are also going to notice
Because while it’s understood doesn’t mean it’s easy, and non-proilferation agreements mean nobody wants to sell them expertise or equipment, and if you try anyway you get sanctioned. Even modern isotope separation techniques rely on large banks of bespoke gas centrifuges. North Korea did it anyway, but most countries value peace and trade more than militarization.
Remote facilities is putting it rather lightly.
It takes essentially an entire factory town to set up a nuclear weapons production enterprise. It’s an incredibly complex process requiring a huge number of personnel with specialized skills, very specific technologies that are internationally restricted and an enormous amount of energy and materiel.
Sellafield in the UK is not exactly small. Neither is Dimona, or Los Alamos, or Sarov. They are large towns or cities. You are not hiding that.
Also, having nuclear weapon is by itself a huge headache for those who have them.
How are you going to ensure no has access to them except you? How will your neighbours react to you having the bomb?
Your taxpayers? It’s a very very heavy sword to wield.
The CIA.
Iran has been trying to develop nukes for a while, around 2010 the CIA developed a virus called Stuxnet and infected almost every device in the world in the hopes of it spreading to air-gapped Iranian centrifuges that were being used to manufacture nuclear weapons grade uranium.
The virus was programmed to look for a specific device firmware and increase the speed of the device very slightly while under reporting to the user to ruin the process.
This only came out because the virus was detected by IT workers around the world. Imagine all the things all the governments do to stop their enemies that we never hear about
Nothing is stopping them per se, but because of the long history of nuclear non-proliferation treaties, other countries have become quite good at spotting the signs of a new nuclear program being started. Uranium and Plutonium are very heavily and very strictly controlled, the equipment used to refine them is highly specialized and very easy to trace, and if they try to make it all at home we’ll see an enormous spike in their energy usage with no obvious reason and go investigating.
On top of that, should they manage to sneak under the radar and design a weapon, they have to test it and the major powers of the world are EXTREMELY good at detecting a nuclear detonation. You cannot hide them from both seismometers (detect the shaking) and satellites (detect the launches, explosions, and radiation).
For example, there was an earthquake in North Korea a few years back. Seismometers that detected it showed the source to be very shallow, far too shallow for a normal earthquake based on the geology of the region, and there was no follow-up quakes, so the only possible explanation for such a strong shake was nuclear testing.
While most of the physics are textbook at this point, doing it in practice has very difficult physical problems.
Enriching natural uranium to get weapons grade uranium is a huge project. It’s expensive, requires an entire industry and also requires large amounts of raw uranium. Uranium is an element. Elements cannot be created. So this is a large and specific supply chain for a lot of things that will be easy to spot. Many countries also just lack the money or industrial base to do this.
More advanced nukes that fit big yields into smaller missiles are also technically complex to make. These are implosion devices and the specific equipment and physics needed for them to work are very picky. Even a slight error = no bomb. There are only a few countries in the world likely able to build an advanced nuke from theory – these are called “screwdriver states” for being able to get stuff off the shelf and proceed. Germany, Japan, South Korea.
Those three countries are also allied to the United States, which will protect them and also will strongly disapprove of leaving the Nonproliferation Treaty to build nukes.
Then there is Taiwan, which is similar to the other three in technical skill and nuclear infrastructure. Taiwan is less clearly protected than the other three, and could do it. But it’s a pretty safe bet China would react *very* badly to any nuclear weapons program unless Taiwan somehow announced it with a dozen completed bombs.
It’s very expensive.
It’s hard to hide hundreds billions dollars going for secret nuclear weapons program, countries that are big enough to do it already have nukes.
The best way to develop nuclear weapons in secret is to have nuclear reactors and a very public nuclear waste recycling program.
If you don’t have a public nuclear waste recycling program and nuclear reactors it will be very obvious to any intelligence agency that you are developing nuclear weapons.
The only country that could pull it off is Japan, the others with nuclear waste recycling already have nuclear weapons.
Developing the materials to make something nuclear would be just as obvious as using any nuclear device.
The energy signature created would be so big that any major world power would have you on their radar long before you could complete the project.
I’d even guess that finding the materials to make something nuclear would be a feat in itself. I doubt any normal person could get their hands on a nuclear core or uranium easily.
Also worth mentioning would be the extreme danger someone would have to go through and risk in order to assemble and build a nuclear weapon.
Also, there are satellites that can easily detect the signature of nuclear devices as long as they are not underground.
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