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Comment by ddulaney | Hacker News Reader

I came away with a very different understanding from the article.

> Back in the 50s, there were two schools of thought - that the ideas could be kept secret, and that the material could be locked up. Now? Well, hopefully the materials can still be locked up, but we all have our doubts about that.

This experiment showed that designing the bomb was the easy part, but manufacturing is still a challenge. Even today, nuclear nonproliferation is largely about making it hard to acquire enough fissile material to make a weapon. Everything from the structure of anti-nuclear treaties to things like Stuxnet is designed around making it impractical to actually manufacture a nuclear weapon, even if you have the design.

> Probably over a hundred countries could do it very rapidly if they wanted to

Only if "rapidly" is measured in years to decades in any reasonable scenario.

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>"...making it hard to acquire enough fissile material to make a weapon."

Which may stop becoming hard if country like Russia decides thar it has nothing to loose and will start selling.

Risky move, what do they gain? Like in exchange for war material?

If nothing else, allied nuclear powers.

Which is not small

If you have one nuclear weapon, you can probably get away with setting up an enrichment framework to produce more without sweating too much.

What do they risk? More sanctions? They're already there up to their gills

I'd be less worried about Russia using a nuke directly as a state, and more about it doing what everyone feared in the fallout of the USSR collapsing.

They've already demonstrated a willingness for its materials to be used obviously on foreign soil with the barest pretense of deniability. I can't imagine they'd sweat too much if somebody set off a dirty bomb, and the willingness to take direct action in response isn't guaranteed by NATO.

I suppose it's somewhat up to how willing China and Iran are to ignore such an obvious act. The thing that actually keeps me up isn't their real response, but Russia's assumption of what it will be. Russia's predictive powers seem to err towards 'what we want is the right idea' more than 'we can actually get away with this', and they've simply taken advantage of tolerance more than weakness/fear.

I’d be more worried about a couple of fringe powers allying in secret and pooling resources. Think North Korea, Iran, Turkey…

We (the US) bought most of the stuff they were willing to sell. We then remanufactured it into fuel that could not be (easily) reprocessed back into materials suitable for nuclear bombs. Russia stopped when they got paranoid about the US purchasing all of the nuclear material and tightened up their handling of the stuff.

If Russia decides to start selling nuclear material again, the US will buy it. Again. And will pay far more than any other nation is willing to pay for the stuff.

> We (the US) bought most of the stuff they were willing to sell.

IIRC they were left with a large amount of weapons-grade material and finished pits even after those programs concluded, and it wouldn't come as a big surprise to hear they've restarted production at some point. Even if they were that tight on material, they have around 6000 warheads and each of those has a Pu pit that could be proliferated, and a regional nuclear power wouldn't need that many to be viable.

> If Russia decides to start selling nuclear material again, the US will buy it

If Russia were to do so, chances are they'd want to prop up a regional nuclear power somewhere for a geopolitical advantage, not primarily cash. The US would certainly not get to make an offer like they used to back in the 90s.

>"If Russia decides to start selling nuclear material again, the US will buy it. Again. "

I do not think Russia will sell it to the US as the whole point of such exercise would be some form of strategic nuclear alliance with other countries. This way they can be protected from being bombed / invaded into "democracy" / "petrodollar" / whatever else.

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