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?
In: Other
Not much really. Certainly the can be foreign interference, but it’s mostly an economic and diplomatic question. Israel and North Korea likely did develop nuclear weapons.
Basically it’s relatively easy to make a nuclear bomb.
The main issue is money and logistics. Which are going to be very obvious.
Firstly you have to find plutonium and uranium which is pretty hard. But then you need a small army of nuclear experts and weapons guys to be able to do something with it (and set them up in expensive labs and stuff). And then they need the uranium or plutonium that is incredibly difficult to make and needs very high tech facilities to purify.
It’s also not enough just to make a nuclear bomb. You have to make it small enough to fit on like a rocket or something, otherwise what’s the point?
So then you need a rocket program which is also hella expensive and requires even more billions and more experts and more testing that is gonna be obvious.
So we’re talking about probably 10s if not 100s of billions over many years which is hard to hide. Not to mention very few countries have that amount of money to invest.
The main thing is that even of the technology is old, it’s still expensive. Think of computer processors for example. They’ve been around for decades, yet you still need multi billion foundries with tech that only 1-2 companies in the world have the know-how to make. It’s the same with nuclear stuff. There’s only a handful of companies that can even make reactors, let alone weapons. There’s likely a vanishingly small amount of people in the world who have the know how to run a nuclear bomb program.
So it’s not like you can just hire a guy that’s good with the nucular and give him some bootleg uranium in a basement.
The US bombing everyone who’s tried. Or developing some of the most advanced malware on the planet to destroy your refinement process.
Actually having secret nuclear weapons is not especially useful. The whole point is for other countries to know you have them.
Some of the equipment is highly specialized. The physics community knew about Iran nuclear testing before the CIA as they found out microsecond switches were on back order. Normally only a dozen or so were needed each year for physics experiments (like on partical colliders). The company had a big order for 300 to a middle eastern company. These are also used in nuclear weapons. These switches are very hard to make.
Materials are rare and fairly easy to notice someone gathering them in enough quantity to begin a nuclear program. You can only be efficient with the materials if you know what you’re doing. If you know what you’re doing, you aren’t in the development stage of the program…
The expertise to design and test nuclear weapons is hard to come by, intelligence agencies keep tabs on where a lot of the scientists trained in the field’s are. Not a clue watch, but where do they work/live, etc. so if a dozen or so get gathered by a government it’s a big clue.
Processing the materials takes large specialized equipment. Biting it sets off flags, building it is looked for too.
The testing is detectable by geologists with their seismographs that monitor for earthquakes.
Besides the reasons already explained by other users here, there is another matter, the “why” a country wants nuclear weapons.
Nowadays the main reason to have one is to let other nations think twice before starting a move against the country, but for it to work the other countries must know that you have it, so … keep it a secret would be meaningless and even if a country somehow makes it successfully, as soon as you announce it, big economic blockades would be imposed against you.
Not an expert, but with the current technology (satelites etc.) and the level of intelligence that the Great Powers have access to, it would be impossible to do it secretly.
Developing a nuclear weapon may not be technically difficult nowadays, but it still requires a great deal of infrastructure that is very hard to conceal. Not to say it requires testing, which is obviously impossible to do in secret.
Latest Answers