No Experience Necessary (2003)
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
Don’t underestimate how hard it would be to assemble an actual working bomb.
We could be happy about the two things that it is not that easy to get enough plutonium in the required purity and that most people love their lives.
I understand that terrorists don’t value lives highly, but you don’t see experienced bombmakers actually conducting suicide attacks for a reason. They’re valuable alive.
For uranium there’s an actual public US government report.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4284913
And here is an interesting write up on how hard it was to manufacture the plutonium spheres for The Gadget at Los Alamos:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2021.1...
And because all the other countries actively work against you getting the bomb.
The calculus is not simply 95% brain drain so 5% not drain so 5% will behave in this way. There is correlation between being in each group.
Or perhaps that supports your point. The smart people with fluid morality are vacuumed up by the Metas of the world, leaving none that would build a nuke for a third world dictator.
How do you know this?
The thing is that most countries don’t want to become nuclear powers because there is a carefully setup and maintained set of incentives against it. This involves both carrots (you get good things if you don’t want nukes) and sticks (bad things happen to you if you do want nukes).
This set of incentives failed a few times and that is how we got nuclear proliferation. Almost everyone who wanted nukes enough despite this set of incentives were able to do it.
I can't know for sure of course. But it seems reasonable to me to think that at least most of the dictators would want to have nukes to keep their hold on power. And there are many.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/dictators...
Unless you have a clear and immediate use, having a nuclear program seems like a very expensive money sink.
The answer is that anyone with the ability and resources has no incentive. If you are smart and driven enough to build a device you can certainly go out and get pretty good programming gig.
The job market/job opportunities for programmers is/are much worse in many other countries. Also consider that many programming jobs that exist are actually quite boring (think into the direction of implementing LoB applications in a department that is considered a cost center instead of profit center). In my experience, there exist not that many programming jobs that give satisfaction to highly smart people, and getting such a job often requires some very specific traits that are quite different from raw intelligence.
Simple. Because to enrich the required materials you need a big operation which sticks out like a sore thumb. There are people actively looking for these with the intent to distrupt them. By the time you are big and sophisticated enough to evade these efforts you are basically a state actor in anything but maybe name.