Why is it so hard to replicate the bulding of a nuclear bomb and why only a small amount of countires have them?
In: Engineering
Whilst the bomb itself is complicated (even though the concept is just squeezing some enriched uranium / plutonium really hard), an obtaining uranium isn’t that difficult. The biggest obstacle is enriching nuclear materials. To do this at the kind of scale required for a functional bomb you need to put huge amounts of time money and energy into specialist equipment (that a foreign country who doesn’t want you to have nukes wont sell to you) such as centrifuges designed for nuclear enrichment.
This kind of investment is only viable in large countries (russia) rich countries (like the UK and France) or both (The USA) their is the outlier to this North Korea but that is only because most of the countries budget goes towards the military. For most countries, the costs of developing nukes far outweigh the benefits they would get, and it is far better to just ally yourself with a larger country that does have nukes.
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