IIRC, in the 70s, there was some prohibition on Iranian students being allowed into nuclear programs at US universities. Do IRC?
If so, couldn’t a bright Iranian student have just bought some books and basically started their own program back in Tehran? Or, are there some hands-on things in engineering that I’m missing?
Thanks,
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Since no one else has addressed this question, I’ll swag at it.
I don’t know about the first two questions. However, nuclear weapon technology is “proprietary domain knowledge”; that is to say, you aren’t going to find anything more than general information and diagram drawings in reference texts. Despite (or perhaps because of) the publication of the Smyth Report, the US is very sensitive to the publication of any information pertaining to nuclear weapon design. This was a big issue, for instance, with the conceptual development of the nuclear-propelled Orion rocket; because the propulsion source was essentially tiny nuclear bomblets–the development of which fell strictly under the domain of the Department of Defense–they couldn’t develop, even in concept, the specific propulsion modules; nonetheless they hired physicist Ted Taylor, the bomb designer primarily responsible for many of the very small fission and boosted fission weapons, to give credible estimates of the feasibility of extremely low-yield devices. (This is sort of like solving a calculus problem without using any algebra or trigonomitry.)
There are two major challenges to developing nuclear weapon technology; the first is creating and/or seperating fissionable isotopes from “poisonous” (neutron-sapping) isotopes which naturally occur. This is an extremely nontrivial exercise requiring many engineering and science disciplines; no one person, or even a small group of people, are going to have the knowledge to develop this from the ground up. The second challenge is weapon design; while a slow neutron gun-type fission bomb is relatively easy to develop, it will be large, bulky, and of low-efficiency; not really appropriate for a small nation or independent group to deploy effectively. An explosive containment-type fission device, of which all modern fission and boosted fission weapons (including the Primaries of thermonuclear (fusion) weapons) are classed, is much more difficult to design, and requires some amount of physical testing to verify simulation models.
It’s unlikely any typical nuclear engineering or nuclear physics student, or even a small group of them, could process, design, and fabricate the necessary components for a nuclear weapon within in a few years. However, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is not unreasonable to suspect that some experienced designers may have sold their experience or provided information to other nations around the world in pursuit of developing weapons technology, facilitating an accelerated development program.
Stranger