Deterrence may be the only way to avoid WWIII.
Five billion is a tentative estimate. I haven't checked the price of 235U and 239Pu on AliExpress.
Deterrence may be the only way to avoid WWIII.
Five billion is a tentative estimate. I haven't checked the price of 235U and 239Pu on AliExpress.
I'm not even sure they have the ingredients for a functioning nuclear reactor after all the international sabotage they've suffered, and bombs require even more highly-enriched fissile material than that.
I am under the impression that no step in the process, including the centrifugues to enrich uranium and the design of the bomb itself is really that difficult for modern engineering anymore and with the resources of a modern nation state on their side there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world who could produce a nuke fairly quickly. The problem with constructing a nuclear reactor is that it will need to be close enough to the surface that it will be vulnerable to attack, but a bomb can be made entirely in the underground facilities they already have. You can't prevent a nation the size of Iran from having access to uranium and you can't expect them not to be able to emulate 80-year-old technology. I am not an expert of course, but this made sense to me.
Iran is like the second/third most sanctioned country and they do not have their economy organized in a rational (socialist) way. The costs for their projects are higher than countries that can freely trade materials and technology, they face extensive sabotage and large conventional military threats. Unlike the DPRK (until fairly recently, not while they were doing their nuclear program), Iran is consuming their weapons in proxy and direct confrontations and has to maintain and expand that production at the same time as any nuclear weapons programme. They also want better air defences & air power, better naval assets, and longer range missiles so the retaliatory threat of a future nuke can reach European-Yankee missiles instead of just Israel.
I was under the impression that enrichment becomes more difficult as the purity increases and requires special hardware, but I'm also no expert.You're correct!
https://tutorials.nti.org/nuclear-101/uranium-enrichment/
Now I'm wondering why every nation doesn't have nukes.
Same reason Iran doesn't. The political costs are really bad. Never mind that the US is already sanctioning Iran, deciding to get nuclear weapons would not be a popular move with Iran's allies and probably not with its own population if it was done when there is no pressing need for it.