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.
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Hey, I'm having an awful fucking morning and you're the first thing making me smile and laugh, so thank you a lot for that. We love you here, tankietanuki
teen david hahn built a nuke in a michigan shed for a little over $1,000usd in the mid 90s, $5b seems steep even with inflation
https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/Looks like he was a good bit away from building a functioning nuclear reactor, much less a bomb. Fascinating story though.
CW: Suicide
spoiler
Sad story too. He was a paranoid schizophrenic and became depressed after the feds raided his house. His mom committed suicide, and he died at age 39 from drugs and alcohol. :(
hey buddy? this is badposting. put the GOOD post
back in c/chapotraphouseDoesn't Iran already for all intents and purposes have nukes? Like, they won't insert a fissile core (which they have) into the actual bomb (which they also have), so technically speaking they don't have a nuclear bomb, but the remaining steps are about as complicated as plugging any appliance into a socket.
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!
the same technology that can produce LEU for reactor fuel can also be used to produce HEU for nuclear weapons. There are no technical barriers to prevent countries with enrichment capabilities from using them to enrich uranium to the higher levels required for nuclear weapons, only legal prohibitions.
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.
