the Netherlands (and most of the European countries) has the skills to build nukes and ICBM in 6 months if it wanted to. The tech is 80 years old at this point.
Eh, probably not. The Dutch have a serious nuclear power economy [1]. But procuring and refining the uranium would take at least a year. Their larger strategic deficit in long-range missile production (or a civil launch industry).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_Netherlan...
https://www.urenco.com/global-operations/urenco-nederland
Because of the counter-intuitive way uranium enrichment works, enrichment from natural uranium to commercial reactor fuel takes more separative work than going from commercial reactor fuel to bomb material:
https://scipython.com/blog/uranium-enrichment-and-the-separa...
Because commercial power reactors consume so much uranium per year, the on-site inventory needed just to produce a year's worth of commercial reactor fuel is enough to make many bomb cores. Nuclear breakout could be very fast if the Netherlands were willing to endure all the diplomatic consequences of withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
I agree about the longer timeline to develop a ballistic missile system that could deliver a warhead.
EDIT: switched erroneous "less" to "more"
More*.
(Also, fascinating. Thank you.)
Also, like 'JumpCrisscross notices, weapons themselves are but half of the equation - the other one is delivery. A few nukes and a trigger-happy dictator can get everyone to back away and indulge you some (see: North Korea), but to play at the big table, you need to have the capacity to deal a serious blow to another country (see: lesser nuclear powers) - but no one will let you get to that point. Nuclear-capable countries are not particularly keen on there being more of them.
Sanctions, maybe. Invaded, almost certainly not. If there is a consistent theme to American, Chinese and Russian foreign policy over the last 30 years, it's that there is a nuclear sovereignty respected above all.
Despite what 'Qiu_Zhanxuan wrote, you can't actually go from 0 to nuclear sovereignty in 6 months, and you definitely can't hide that you're doing it for long.
No, but you can go from 0 to "possibly nuclear everyone yell about it," and stay there until you're actually nuclear.
Nobody will do anything about possibly nuclear. And nobody will do anything once you're nuclear. This was the critical hole in non-proliferation, and for a while it worked, because everyone pretended nuclear sovereignty wasn't a thing, but now that it is there is--and should be--a race to who are the regional powers, and who are subsurvient to them. The Netherlands have a history of being conquered and being rich. It makes sense for them to be a nuclear sovereign.
Fair, but I imagine everyone learned from that, too.
> The Netherlands have a history of being conquered and being rich. It makes sense for them to be a nuclear sovereign.
Arguably, it makes sense for every country to be one, if they could pull it off, but so far it seems they're sufficiently deterred from trying.