There was a discussion in another board about what nations built nuclear weapons on their own, or with outside help.
Israel had help from France
USSR had help from the US (in the form of theft)
Pakistan had help from the Netherlands (in the form of theft)
China had help from the USSR
India had help from the US and Canada
Iraq had help from France (didn’t get nukes, but France built their reactors)
North Korea & Iran had help from Pakistan
The US supposedly didn’t help UK or France build nukes after the war, but they got them anyway. Were the UK and France able to build nukes totally independently w/o outside help?
There were British and Canadian scientists working on the Manhattan Project. So you could say the United States had help in developing its atomic weapons. (If you want to included unintentional help, you could add Germany and Italy, which drove out a number of scientists who later worked in America.)
An important piece of that is that the UK started their nuclear weapons program before the US did. It was before the US even entered WWII. When the US began a larger and better resourced project the British shelved their project, shared their data, and participated in the US program.
The US didn’t even develop it’s weapons independently.
According to the wiki article, the US didn’t share all of its knowledge with Britain after the US successfully completed the bomb.
The British then re-started their nuclear weapons programme and exploded their own device. That led to the US and the UK resuming close working relationships on nuclear weapons.
The formal relationship only restarted after Britain successfully tested a thermonuclear device in 1958*. A relatively straightforward plutonium bomb was detonated in 1952 - making the UK the third nuclear power. Between 1952 and 1958 various more sophisticated and powerful designs were given a go, with mixed results. That suggests to me that the UK bomb programme was pretty stand alone at that point. Our spies evidently not as good as the Russian ones, I guess.
Grapple Y, still the largest device ever tested by the UK at 3 megatonnes
One of the biggest key pieces of information in a nuclear weapons program is the mere knowledge that it’s possible. And that’s inherently not going to be secret, and so the US indirectly helped everyone to develop nukes.
Right. Going nuclear-capable (as opposed to acquiring one or two “aftermarket” bombs) requires enormous investment. The Manhattan Project was the second-most expensive project of World War II, only exceeded by the B-29 project, which was intended to deliver the bombs and could be considered part of the overall cost. The decision to undertake such an expense is still tough, but knowing it’s physically possible must certainly make that decision easier than if one is merely gambling on unknowns.
There’s plenty of detail out there for the layman, and I assume trained physicists can pick out a lot more. Even Tom Clancy’s *Sum of all Fears *has a pretty good primer on how to make a nuke if the materials fall into your lap. The concept of centrifuges for isotope separation seem to be pretty widely known, so there just needs to be a pretty good engineering crew to produce those. And so on… One of Heinlein’s early stories describes the basic concept of two hemispheres slammed together by explosives, so obviously that much was well known also even in the 50’s.
Yes, tell a bunch of scientists - “this concept has proven to work, now how do we reproduce it?” is a far easier task than trying to figure out if it will work.
I would add Pakistan and India to the list of helped by the “US and UK”. As well as the missing SA, basically the British project was a commonwealth project.
I am not sure about the “theft” bit. Declassified Russian and Pakistani documents show that the @transfer” of tech was helpful but not determinative.