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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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
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