Why It's So Hard to Make Nuclear Weapons | Hacker News Reader

Why It's So Hard to Make Nuclear Weapons

livescience.com

33 pointsfjabre20 comments

>"But a major problem with uranium bombs, Kristensen said, is the fact that the material happens to be the world’s heaviest naturally occurring element (twice as heavy as lead). According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear bomb needs about 33 pounds (15 kilograms) of uranium to be operational, a requirement that hinders how far a missile can travel. The bulkiness of uranium also makes it harder to mount the technology to existing missile systems."

This is rubbish. 15 kgs is hardly what keeps a missile from travelling around athe world, it's the tamper, explosives and other assorted hardware (weighing around 1000 kgs for a crude device).

>"Unlike uranium bombs, plutonium bombs are detonated using an 'implosion' method"

More rubbish, uranium bombs can also be implosion designs, indeed most modern ones (primaries in thermonuclear bombs) are.

Also very strange to complain about the bulkiness of something that's twice as heavy as lead.

Toshiba Builds 100x Smaller Micro Nuclear Reactor

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news-toshiba...

Overall quality of the article is suspect.

>"process that begins with using a subatomic particle known as a neutron"

Hate to nitpick pop articles, but this particular sentence fragment jumped out in particular, why can't they simply write neutron? Otherwise I get the impression neutron was known as Prince in previous life...

William Langewiesche --- badass narrative journalist formally of The Atlantic Monthly --- wrote a pretty good book on this topic called _The Atomic Bazaar_.

There are other reasons why it's tricky for non-state actors to acquire workable nuclear weapons, including the fact that the weapons they're likely to get will probably kill them before they can kill us.

On the other hand, remember that when engineers talk about things like managing the window of supercritical mass before the explosion rips the bomb apart, a non-ballistic nuclear device (like something rigged in a shipping container) wouldn't need to be nearly as efficient as a US nuclear weapon to wreak total havoc.

Also, non-state actors aren't going to centrifuge their own enriched uranium; they're going to steal it from the CIS states.

> Spector thinks such a time frame is still reasonable enough for the United States to dissuade Iran from continuing down that path.

> "All the really dangerous actions that Iran can do, haven’t been done," he said. "They do not appear to be manufacturing parts or developing designs for an advanced nuclear weapon. So if the U.S. can strike a deal with them where both sides can find some satisfaction, it may be enough to end the crisis."

This seems hopelessly naive to me. The "crisis" is that we don't trust Iran with nukes. What magic negotiation or concession can we offer in the next 18 months that will get them to stop pursuing nukes that we haven't tried before? They may halt facilities, only to move them underground or fire them up later when it is to their advantage.

It's like the NK situation all over again.

What magic negotiation or concession can we offer in the next 18 months that will get them to stop pursuing nukes that we haven't tried before?

I think the involvement of China and Russia is the new development that may make the threat of sanctions more meaningful.

This article is a little silly. First it moves the goal posts from making nuclear weapons to making advanced nuclear weapons (e.g. Plutonium implosion designs), with the justification that only implosion weapons are suitable for ICBM delivery.

However, this analysis is inaccurate, naive, and misleading. Look at the history of nuclear proliferation. South Africa, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea all successfully acquired nuclear weapons production capability, the later 2 fairly recently. All but North Korea and South Africa are sure to have built advanced weapons.

Also, there are 2 parts to the equation implicit in this article: a nuclear warhead and an ICBM capable of carrying it. Unfortunately, it's just as easy to keep working on the 2nd part to make bigger rockets with heavier payload capacity, even if you are never able to figure out how to make an advanced, lightweight warhead. India has the capability to launch a dead-simple gun-type Uranium bomb to anywhere in the world, for example. North Korea's missile program is maybe 10-20 years behind India's. And North Korea has been sharing its missile technology with Iran.

It's naive to think that we're safe merely because the technological road is difficult. At best it's just a matter of time, given concerted effort.

South Africa built at least 6 deliverable nuclear weapons (bombing airplanes). If it was tested, no one knows. There were suggestions that SA tested in 1979 (Vela incident).

For what it is worth, South Africa had a fairly good rocket development. The Israeli Jericho rocket was actually a joint Israeli-South African project (the Jericho missiles were tested in SA btw). The RSA rockets would have been able to carry South African nuclear warheads. This (and the whole company Houteq) got dismantled in 1990 though.

South Africa had a different strategy with its nuclear weapons though. Its main purpose of its program was to force the USA to act if the RSA was threatened by the USSR.

There's a book called "The Bomb in My Garden", about the man responsible for Iraq's nuclear weapons program in the 90's, which get pretty in depth to the length he had to go to in order to get "not very close".

It gets into a lot more detail than this article, so if you're interested I'd recommend checking it out: http://www.amazon.com/Bomb-My-Garden-Secrets-Mastermind/dp/0...

What I don't get is why haven't anybody brought one on the black market from some Russian general who is ready to take a lot of black money?

There is got to be plenty of counties who would be prepared to pay a lot of money for such a device, since it guarantees that they will never be attacked by the US.

It also guarantees sanctions and other nice things.

Not really. The worst sort of situation for a country to be in in terms of nuclear deterrence is to have only one nuclear weapon, because even though the threat of using it has significant power it would leave them utterly defenceless if they were to ever use one. It would be a weapon they could never realistically use, because they would be unable to deter the inevitably-devastating counter-attack, and so the threat itself would become baseless.

Having two or three isn't that much better, since it still leaves them with a finite supply and no way to replace the weapons once they reach the end of their usable lives. There's also always the possibility that a foreign power would be able to divine the locations of such a small number of bombs and be able to destroy or steal them all.

With its own program, a country can avoid all of those disadvantages by producing enough weapons to distribute them and maintaining strategic ambiguity about their exact number and location while possessing the capability to renew and replace the bombs as they age.

Terrorist groups, on the other hand, would be perfectly happy with just one nuclear bomb. Unlike a state, they don't have to worry about deterrence or their ability to carry out a second strike. But that's why the US and other countries have put a lot of effort into securing Russia's nuclear stockpile and part of the reason why there continues to be huge effort to prevent nuclear proliferation.

If some guy claiming to be a Russian general offers to sell you what looks like a surplus nuclear warhead, how do you know he isn't a CIA or FSB agent running a sting? How do you know that he hasn't ripped out the electronics that control the timing of the implosion and sold them to someone else? How do you know that the guy who assembled that particular warhead back in 1973 was sober and followed all the instructions? (If you have eighty nuclear warheads in your arsenal, you have a credible nuclear deterrent even if each warhead has a 75% chance of being a dud. If you have one, not so much.)

> There is got to be plenty of counties who would be prepared to pay a lot of money for such a device, since it guarantees that they will never be attacked by the US.

Not really. You need a device and a delivery mechanism. If either fail you are basically ending your country as an independent entity for the next couple of decades or so and you personally are unlikely to survive long after the failure.

If you have one device and declare it the general public will not believe it (some will, those "in the know" probably will if they can confirm it, but most will think it is tin-hat BS) so you need two devices: one to "test" openly and one to hold in reserve. If you bought a device rather than built it yourself the game enters a cat-and-mouse phase where a large fraction of US resources will be devoted to finding your device and blowing it up, if they succeed then you die shortly after.

If you get the device and just tell the US secretly that you have it then the cat-and-mouse game starts without the need for public posturing on either side and you (and most of the senior leadership of your country) are likely to find yourself on the unpleasant end of soft-power attempts at regime change and not-so-soft attempts that come from a busboy with a silencer.

There is a somewhat fuzzy critical mass of devices and reliable delivery mechanisms that are required before you are a threat with enough credibility to use your nukes as a shield. NK probably has a few nukes, but their artillery along the DMZ and the proximity of same to Soeul is really the only thing keeping Kim Jong Il alive; your hypothetical country has almost no hope of hitting the US and if it is not close to a US ally that its people actually care about then all bets are off. If Sudan suddenly declared that it had bought a nuke then you could probably measure Bashir's future lifespan in weeks...

As a deterrent to invasion, use as a super-mine against ground troops would be perfectly adequate and requires no fancy delivery system; just adequate security as to exactly where it was located.

so you're going to... nuke yourself? yikes.

Nope, you fall back so the nuke is behind the enemy's lines; classic ambush tactics. As an example, the Iraqis could have left a nuke buried behind themselves to knock out substantial US forces, if they had one. I haven't seen anything about it, but how much precautions the military took would tell you how seriously the gov't actually took their own claims about Iraqi nukes.

>There is got to be plenty of counties who would be prepared to pay a lot of money for such a device, since it guarantees that they will never be attacked by the US.

Or it guarantees that if they are attacked by the US, it will be with a massive and overwhelming nuclear attack.

Another problem is that a nuclear weapon isn't just something you buy and keep in a lock-up until you need it, like, say, tanks or guns.

They need maintenance - the physics package decays (literally). For example, in fusion bombs, you have to replenish the tritium in the core, and in fission bombs you have to periodically replace the plutonium core.

There's a section about this in the Poundstone book "Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb", and I don't recall the precise details, but this was a problem for arms control too. How do you count how many bombs a country has, when "bomb" is a loose term and bombs are kept in pieces, constantly being dismantled, replaced and upgraded.

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