This is not surprising at all. The first bombs were made when nuclear physics was not well understood, and the Las Almos computer, was a group of humans working in an assembly line to perform complex calculations by hand. These calculations were required to understand the interaction of the various pieces.
A few decades later, the theories of nuclear physics had advanced considerably, IC computers were available for rapid calculations, the algorithms required for these calculations were present in textbooks, as were the results of many computations that did not have to be redone.
Today, designing every aspect of a nuclear weapon, from the actual weapon itself to the machines and factories required to manufacture them, is even easier. The only real deterrent to countries building nuclear weapons are political in nature. Probably over a hundred countries could do it very rapidly if they wanted to, but thankfully we are limited to about a dozen of them.
This is something to reflect on, when arguing that the spread of bad technology, especially one that does require many millions to manufacture, cannot be stopped.
One thing is that is easy to develop an inefficient atomic bomb. It is harder to develop one small enough to be delivered and/or thermonuclear bomb.
Also, acquiring the material has always been the hard part. It requires nuclear reactors then reprocessing the waste to get plutonium. Or enriching uranium to get U-235.
There is term, nuclear latency, for countries that could easily develop nuclear weapons. Some identified ones are Japan, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Australia, Argentina, South Korea, and Taiwan. Japan is special case with 50 tons of plutonium.
Canada is the second largest supplier of Uranium if my memory serves me. It also has few CANDU reactors.
If the article is correct in that a couple of physics grad students could make a design in the 60s that could be made in an average machine shop, im sure its the case Canada retains the ability.
Not sure our economy wouldnt collapse as a result though.
Canada could very easily produce nuclear weapons, even at scale, if it wanted to. The U.S. would likely even help them in doing so if the government requested the assistance. As you say, it's one of the worlds main suppliers of uranium, already possesses highly advanced nuclear technology and facilities, and has the institutional know-how to be a nuclear power with low relative cost and minimal external interference. If even South Africa made and (supposedly, see below) tested a nuclear weapon way back in the 70's, many countries today and especially Canada could do so with little economic or technical difficulty.
I came away with a very different understanding from the article.
> Back in the 50s, there were two schools of thought - that the ideas could be kept secret, and that the material could be locked up. Now? Well, hopefully the materials can still be locked up, but we all have our doubts about that.
This experiment showed that designing the bomb was the easy part, but manufacturing is still a challenge. Even today, nuclear nonproliferation is largely about making it hard to acquire enough fissile material to make a weapon. Everything from the structure of anti-nuclear treaties to things like Stuxnet is designed around making it impractical to actually manufacture a nuclear weapon, even if you have the design.
> Probably over a hundred countries could do it very rapidly if they wanted to
Only if "rapidly" is measured in years to decades in any reasonable scenario.
I'd be less worried about Russia using a nuke directly as a state, and more about it doing what everyone feared in the fallout of the USSR collapsing.
They've already demonstrated a willingness for its materials to be used obviously on foreign soil with the barest pretense of deniability. I can't imagine they'd sweat too much if somebody set off a dirty bomb, and the willingness to take direct action in response isn't guaranteed by NATO.
I suppose it's somewhat up to how willing China and Iran are to ignore such an obvious act. The thing that actually keeps me up isn't their real response, but Russia's assumption of what it will be. Russia's predictive powers seem to err towards 'what we want is the right idea' more than 'we can actually get away with this', and they've simply taken advantage of tolerance more than weakness/fear.
We (the US) bought most of the stuff they were willing to sell. We then remanufactured it into fuel that could not be (easily) reprocessed back into materials suitable for nuclear bombs. Russia stopped when they got paranoid about the US purchasing all of the nuclear material and tightened up their handling of the stuff.
If Russia decides to start selling nuclear material again, the US will buy it. Again. And will pay far more than any other nation is willing to pay for the stuff.
>"If Russia decides to start selling nuclear material again, the US will buy it. Again. "
I do not think Russia will sell it to the US as the whole point of such exercise would be some form of strategic nuclear alliance with other countries. This way they can be protected from being bombed / invaded into "democracy" / "petrodollar" / whatever else.
> We (the US) bought most of the stuff they were willing to sell.
IIRC they were left with a large amount of weapons-grade material and finished pits even after those programs concluded, and it wouldn't come as a big surprise to hear they've restarted production at some point. Even if they were that tight on material, they have around 6000 warheads and each of those has a Pu pit that could be proliferated, and a regional nuclear power wouldn't need that many to be viable.
> If Russia decides to start selling nuclear material again, the US will buy it
If Russia were to do so, chances are they'd want to prop up a regional nuclear power somewhere for a geopolitical advantage, not primarily cash. The US would certainly not get to make an offer like they used to back in the 90s.
There was a post (I believe here on HN) several years ago about a guy who made improvised weapons in airports using only things that were available in Duty Free aka after you had gone through security.
He had all kinds of things: stun guns, flamethrower, club etc.
The details are kind of secondary to a point someone made in the comments:
"This guy has clearly demonstrated that it's trivial to do all of the things necessary to build these things and take over an airplane. The fact that no one has done so in the past couple years has made me seriously question if:
a. anyone is trying (probably not)
b. given (a), do we really need all of this security theater?"
Honestly, between a) armored cockpit doors and b) the knowledge (both passengers, and pilots) of what happens if you let hijackers into the cockpit, a 9/11 style attack isn't likely to ever happen again.
Trabal knowledge gets forgotten too, just over longer timespans. One day, planes will fly with no one on board having been alive when 9/11 happened. They may not make the same assumptions about intent as adults today do. "Ever" again is a little long to be so sure.
"Tribal knowledge" of airplane hijackings was why 9/11 worked initially.
People sat still because a "standard" airplane hijacking meant going to some odd airport while a bunch of "freedom fighters" got their 15 minutes of fame and then everybody on the plane got safely released a week or two later.
Once people realized that the 9/11 hijackings instead were suicide runs, the "tribal knowledge" broke and people didn't sit still anymore (see: the fourth plane on 9/11 or the shoe bomber).
Nuclear bombs are essentially unprofitable and impossible to use anonymously, so they aren't really analogous to most dangerous tech that needs to be controlled.
You're right. But I don't think profit is everyone's first concern. The Kim dynasty needs the DPRK army as a tool of internal control more than it does for defense.
You don't use a nuclear bomb. Well, maybe once, somewhere remote. The idea is once you do, you can do anything you want. Want to annex Ukraine? Want to run a country where you're the dear leader? All you need is a nuke.
Most dangerous tech is more a "temptation to misuse" rather than a largely unusable (but effective) threat to wave around like a nuke or a biological WMD.
Doesn't everyone studying for a bachelor's degree in applied physics have to work out things like critical mass and how to avoid premature explosion?
At least we did when I was studying for my Applied Physics degree in the mid 70s. It was not regarded as even slightly controversial that we should do so nor that it was especially difficult. It was simply one of the problems set in the nuclear physics course.
Of course we didn't go into the same degree of detail as Dobson, Pipkorn, and Selden and our solutions would probably not have been as effective but that was mostly because it was the thought process rather than the ultimate result that was important.
I had a first year’s physics class where we convinced our professor to walk through how to create a nuclear bomb of the two main types.
He was a young physicist at the Manhattan Project and told us stories of that as well… like the worry of igniting the oxygen of the planet’s atmosphere, how he didn’t worry being at blast site but grew concerned the farther he got (but inside dangerous radius), how the guards lost their shit and dropped their guns and ran when it went off (and the physicists cheer and looked at the panels instead of the slit window).
Well the trick is to ensure that the mass only becomes critical right when you want it to. So -- I imagine -- most of the work in making a working atomic bomb is more about the precisely-controlled explosions that detonate it, not the fission itself.
Gun-type bombs like Little Boy used in Hiroshima are less efficient, but much simpler. Shoot an enriched uranium projectile into an enriched uranium target, such that the combined volume they compress to is supercritical.
We got extremely lucky that it's super hard to separate the isotopes of uranium and plutonium that can be used to make an A-bomb from the minerals that can be mined on Earth surface. If it was easier to do every dictatorship and every terrorist group like ISIS would build a nuclear arsenal and the biggest remaining city on Earth today would be probably 10,000 people.
We got lucky with nuclear chain reaction, but who knows what weapons of mass destruction will become possible with further advances in physics, biology, material science, AI. A discovery that will make it possible for a small group of extremists to destroy the human civilization may be the Great Filter.
Plutonium is the element with the highest atomic number to occur in nature. Neutrons are in abundance in supernova, so heavy elements like plutonium can be created in copious quantities. Trace quantities arise in natural uranium-238 deposits when uranium-238 captures neutrons emitted by decay of other uranium-238 atoms. Plutonium is separated from uranium and other transuranium elements by subjecting an aqueous solution in dilute nitric acid of the elements to be separated to electrolytic extraction by counter-current or cross-current ion migration in the presence of a complexing agent, preferably acetic acid or a mixture of hydrofluoric acid with an alkali metal fluoride, until plutonium and the other elements present accumulate in separate portions of the solution which are thereafter separately withdrawn.[1]
[1] This is all copypasta from Wikipedia and firsts of Google search results.
> Selden and Dobson proved that there is enough freely floating information in libraries and on the internet using which any technically-savvy person with the right resources could create an atomic bomb, and this include terrorists.
That reminds me of a friend being raided by police some 30+ years ago because he published instructions how to create explosives online. He had copied some texts from a very old book that was not copyrighted anymore and, which he, a minor at that time, found in his public library. Fortunately, he never went to trial for that and his rather scientific parents were pretty understanding.
Designing is one thing... getting the materials is another. I feel like there are pretty good systems in place to monitor and detect that behavior.
I, for one, don't wish to democratize access to nuclear weapons. Let's keep it so that only nation states willing to maintain them, have them. Maintenance seems to be about $10,000,000/year.
> The duo was banned from consulting classified research but anything they produced—diagrams and notes—automatically became classified. [...] Finally, after a presentation at Livermore, a senior researcher named Jim Frank pulled them aside and told them that the experiment was a resounding success. Had it been constructed, Jim told them, it would have made a pretty impressive bang as large as Hiroshima."
This does not pass the smell test. People who work with classified information are absolutely paranoid. This Jim Frank guy was very likely not allowed to disclose the result of the experiment to anyone without a clearance, including the "duo".
They probably went through the clearance process, with information only kept from them in order to see how they would fare without it.
Evidence consistent with this is that they were allowed to design experiments and get results of them back. So they were given classified info just in a very controlled way.
Yes, but then we wouldn't know about the result. Except if someone was terribly careless with classified information. Or if the "leaked" info was actually a decoy.
The major "roadblock" is getting the nuclear materials - getting enough of the correct isotopes and avoiding the "wrong" isotopes.
Counterproliferation is a tireless and thankless profession. The term for technologies that can be used for good or evil are generally called "dual use". One of the common ones is HF. Hydrogen Fluoride can be used in the uranium enrichment process as well as in refining gasoline/petrol. There have been no new oil refineries built in the US in the past half century, yet more gasoline, and higher octane fuel, has been produced (in the US) while closing some refineries. HF is used in a large number of industrial processes, I merely listed 2 which Iran would love to have. Their gasoline refineries are working with 1960s level technology, which burns up most of the crude oil they extract. Supplying them with HF would let them modernize their refineries to the point where they could export far more crude. Or let them make "yellowcake" for refining into highly enriched uranium. I'm aware that no sample of enriched uranium collected by IAEA shows enrichment past what is needed for their domestic nuclear reactors (about 4% enriched for power reactors and 20% for the one that makes radioactive chemotherapy stuff).
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [0] says that signatories of the treaty are forbidden from transferring dual-use materials & technologies to countries that have not signed the treaty. This was why a Bush-era trade deal with India [1] was so controversial. Neither India (nor Pakistan, nor Israel) have signed the NPT.
Counter-proliferation is an active process. You have to actively block pathways to building nuclear weapons, and constantly run intelligence operations tracking these.
The difficulty in making a nuclear weapon is in making a clean, effective, efficient, and high powered one. Making one with a relatively low yield is really not especially difficult. The principal difficulty is merely obtaining the fissile material.
Two hemispheres of accurately machined fissile material, a vacuum pump, some really solid steel tubing, and some TNT will make a bomb.
The average engineering shop doesn't have what it takes to safely machine fissile material. It's actually quite hard - unless you don't care about irradiating and poisoning your workers, and possibly risking a squib explosion.
This makes me feel guilty about the atomic spies the US executed. They were labeled as modern day Judases who enabled the cold war, but really weren't much different from any other spy.
Are you saying that in 20-50 years we all gonna be peaceful to each other or nuke the planet? Is that the reason why we're not getting a signal from distant civilizations?
> The Laboratory hired three physicists—Dave Dobson, David Pipkorn, and Rob Selden— who recently received their Ph.Ds in physics but had little to no experience with nuclear physics.
They went out of their way not to hire people with knowledge of nuclear physics.
A few decades later, the theories of nuclear physics had advanced considerably, IC computers were available for rapid calculations, the algorithms required for these calculations were present in textbooks, as were the results of many computations that did not have to be redone.
Today, designing every aspect of a nuclear weapon, from the actual weapon itself to the machines and factories required to manufacture them, is even easier. The only real deterrent to countries building nuclear weapons are political in nature. Probably over a hundred countries could do it very rapidly if they wanted to, but thankfully we are limited to about a dozen of them.
This is something to reflect on, when arguing that the spread of bad technology, especially one that does require many millions to manufacture, cannot be stopped.