Nuclear Proliferation and the "Nth Country Experiment"

nsarchive.gwu.edu

39 points·nabla9··8 comments

It took 3 years to build a weapon design from scratch. I wonder how long it would take now using an abliterated LLM? A week?

Maybe a week. Or maybe after a week you end up with a nice batch of chocolate chip cookies.

"As a large language model, I cannot provide you with a design for a nuclear weapon. How about some nice cookies to bring to the diplomatic table? Eating together helps people form bonds of friendship. In past negotiations, this cookie recipe has helped smoothed over..."

Not all LLMs are cloud hosted censorship machines.

>How about some nice cookies to bring to the diplomatic table?

And here is a recipe for a cookie with plutonium filling in a beryllium tamper...

The weapon is the easy part. Doable by most countries nowadays given enough enriched U235. The only slightly difficult thing is the trigger system, for which you can find measurements and designs online.

But the deliver system is a whole different story. Missiles and jet engines are much more difficult to develop from scratch.

That’s why non-proliferation focuses on preventing countries from enriching Uranium and preventing countries from developing rocket booster technology.

I also thought the Oppenheimer movie was stupid

Given how often LLMs hallucinate answers about relatively trivial questions where all of the material is in the public domain, I'd say quite a while.

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