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The difficulty in making a nuclear weapon is in making a clean, effective, efficient, and high powered one. Making one with a relatively low yield is really not especially difficult. The principal difficulty is merely obtaining the fissile material.

Two hemispheres of accurately machined fissile material, a vacuum pump, some really solid steel tubing, and some TNT will make a bomb.

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The average engineering shop doesn't have what it takes to safely machine fissile material. It's actually quite hard - unless you don't care about irradiating and poisoning your workers, and possibly risking a squib explosion.

If you’re trying to build a bootleg nuke in order to actually use it, I’d imagine you might be willing to compromise on workers safety a little.

I mean that has got to be a sarcastic caveat, rather than a point against the probability of it happening

No One Lives Forever (aka The Operative: No One Lives Forever) had a lot of these talks in NPC dialogues...

I think there was a Doomwatch episode that addressed this sort of thing, it didn't go well.

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