4 ms·

Probably the same way that nations that previously tested nuclear weapons currently develop nuclear weapons: with supercomputers and ICF facilities. Making a b

Probably the same way that nations that previously tested nuclear weapons currently develop nuclear weapons: with supercomputers and ICF facilities. Making a bomb isn't very tricky. The nuclear bomb tests were a combination of learning physics and threatening adversaries. The understanding of making nuclear weapons doesn't see significant benefit from blowing up more bombs. The physics is freely available. The gist of the designs are public. The rest is plug n chug.

iab 5y ago
I think there is a large discrepancy between hypothetically viable, and demonstrably viable.
- willis936 5y ago
  The designs are demonstrably viable. Hundreds of nukes were detonated unnecessarily to prove this point. Nations don't need to make new designs. Gun and super designs are common knowledge.
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    If you want to be on the UN Security council you need to detonate a nuke somewhere in a desert. It's a requirement.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > If you want to be on the UN Security council you need to detonate a nuke somewhere in a desert. No, you don’t. Every UN member rotates through UNSC seats. If you want a permanent Security Council seat, you need to be or be generally recognized successor in interest to one of five powers that got those seats after WW2, when only one had detonated nuclear weapons (and the important one were on Japanese cities, not desert.)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- grkvlt 5y ago
  If you only care about fission weapons, a practically viable weapon is easy, and does not require testing. This was demonstrated by South Africa, who developed a fission weapon, using an indigenous and entirely novel isotope separation technique and no outside help. They produced a stockpile of around five weapons, with absolutely no testing. The Vela incident often referred to is outwith the relevant timescale, being in 1979 and the weapons program ran from 1984 to 1994. The devices themselves were gun-type bombs using uranium, similar to the 'little boy' (Hiroshima) design, with improvements in safety primarily. This was as a hedge against Soviet agression in the Angolan civil war, and they were intending to detonate one of the bombs as proof of their capability if the situation ever became desperate. As a pariah state due to Apartheid, the idea was that the US and allies would be forced to abandon their arms embargos and step in to help with conventional assistance in order to prevent World War III. This never happened, and South Africa is still the only state ever to have developed a viable nuclear weapons capability and then voluntarily given it up. The details are available in an excellent book by David Albright of ISIS (not that one, the Institute foir Science and International Security...) at https://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/RevisitingSouthAfricasNuclearWeaponsProgram.pdf https://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/Revis...
Animats 5y ago
Making a gun-type fission bomb, like the Hiroshima bomb, takes a lot of highly enriched uranium, but it isn't complicated. Making a plutonium implosion bomb is hard, for a number of reasons. Making a good implosion is moderately hard. It takes two kinds of explosives and lots of tricks to make it work. Plus techniques for making X-ray movies of an explosion as it happens to debug the process. Los Alamos went through tons of explosives getting that right. "The Curve of Binding Energy", by John McPhee, covers all this. Making a fusion bomb is quite hard, and there are still parts of that which are classified. US bombs use some material called "FOGBANK", which is not only classified but so hard to make that there was a period of over a decade during which the US couldn't make it. There's some grumbling in the nuclear establishment that there were too many smart people working on bomb designs in the 1950s and 1960s, and as a result, the designs are too complicated. This is a problem for building new bombs without testing them. On the enrichment side, the centrifuges keep getting better. The original gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge was a mile long. Everybody who built nuclear weapons in the 1950s had to build up a huge amount of plant. Today, an enrichment facility is about the size of a WalMart SuperCenter or a medium to large data center.[1] Laser enrichment requires even less plant, but it's hard to make it work. The technology is mostly classified, but the NRC has a self-training course on it.[2] The current leading company in that area is SILEX, in Australia. Their investor presentation indicates that silicon isotope separation, which has some use in quantum computing, has more business potential than uranium separation. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/Eunice,+New+Mexico/@32.43481294,-103.07872054,1047.39036622a,2228.53007228d,34.99999741y,0h,0t,0r https://earth.google.com/web/search/Eunice,+New+Mexico/@32.4... [2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A051.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A051.pdf

iab 5y ago

I think there is a large discrepancy between hypothetically viable, and demonstrably viable.

willis936 5y ago
The designs are demonstrably viable. Hundreds of nukes were detonated unnecessarily to prove this point. Nations don't need to make new designs. Gun and super designs are common knowledge.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  If you want to be on the UN Security council you need to detonate a nuke somewhere in a desert. It's a requirement.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > If you want to be on the UN Security council you need to detonate a nuke somewhere in a desert. No, you don’t. Every UN member rotates through UNSC seats. If you want a permanent Security Council seat, you need to be or be generally recognized successor in interest to one of five powers that got those seats after WW2, when only one had detonated nuclear weapons (and the important one were on Japanese cities, not desert.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
grkvlt 5y ago
If you only care about fission weapons, a practically viable weapon is easy, and does not require testing. This was demonstrated by South Africa, who developed a fission weapon, using an indigenous and entirely novel isotope separation technique and no outside help. They produced a stockpile of around five weapons, with absolutely no testing. The Vela incident often referred to is outwith the relevant timescale, being in 1979 and the weapons program ran from 1984 to 1994. The devices themselves were gun-type bombs using uranium, similar to the 'little boy' (Hiroshima) design, with improvements in safety primarily. This was as a hedge against Soviet agression in the Angolan civil war, and they were intending to detonate one of the bombs as proof of their capability if the situation ever became desperate. As a pariah state due to Apartheid, the idea was that the US and allies would be forced to abandon their arms embargos and step in to help with conventional assistance in order to prevent World War III. This never happened, and South Africa is still the only state ever to have developed a viable nuclear weapons capability and then voluntarily given it up. The details are available in an excellent book by David Albright of ISIS (not that one, the Institute foir Science and International Security...) at https://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/RevisitingSouthAfricasNuclearWeaponsProgram.pdf https://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/Revis...

Animats 5y ago

Making a gun-type fission bomb, like the Hiroshima bomb, takes a lot of highly enriched uranium, but it isn't complicated. Making a plutonium implosion bomb is hard, for a number of reasons. Making a good implosion is moderately hard. It takes two kinds of explosives and lots of tricks to make it work. Plus techniques for making X-ray movies of an explosion as it happens to debug the process. Los Alamos went through tons of explosives getting that right. "The Curve of Binding Energy", by John McPhee, covers all this. Making a fusion bomb is quite hard, and there are still parts of that which are classified. US bombs use some material called "FOGBANK", which is not only classified but so hard to make that there was a period of over a decade during which the US couldn't make it. There's some grumbling in the nuclear establishment that there were too many smart people working on bomb designs in the 1950s and 1960s, and as a result, the designs are too complicated. This is a problem for building new bombs without testing them. On the enrichment side, the centrifuges keep getting better. The original gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge was a mile long. Everybody who built nuclear weapons in the 1950s had to build up a huge amount of plant. Today, an enrichment facility is about the size of a WalMart SuperCenter or a medium to large data center.[1] Laser enrichment requires even less plant, but it's hard to make it work. The technology is mostly classified, but the NRC has a self-training course on it.[2] The current leading company in that area is SILEX, in Australia. Their investor presentation indicates that silicon isotope separation, which has some use in quantum computing, has more business potential than uranium separation. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/Eunice,+New+Mexico/@32.43481294,-103.07872054,1047.39036622a,2228.53007228d,34.99999741y,0h,0t,0r https://earth.google.com/web/search/Eunice,+New+Mexico/@32.4... [2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A051.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A051.pdf