I wasn’t sure where to put this question, honestly.
Officially, only a few countries have nukes. But I find that unlikely. If I have the money, time, and talent, why shouldn’t I build 'em? Like Canada-I’m sure they could build one if they wanted to do it. Why not?
There is deterrent value in the ambiguous “Maybe we do; maybe we don’t. F*** around and find out.” stance that Israel has had for many years, despite the fact the “maybe we don’t” part is pretty threadbare these days, and has been for a couple decades now.
There is deterrent value in the ambiguous “Maybe we’re far enough along to have deliverable weapons or maybe we aren’t.” stance that’s current in NK and becoming current in Iran.
But there is no deterrent value in 'We have them, and it’s a total secret that nobody else, especially potential adversaries, knows about".
You also grossly underestimate how hard it would be to have a complete nuclear weapons and nuclear delivery system enterprise with zero leaks over decades. Even if for some silly reason some wealthy-enough government wanted to do that, they’d fail.
Exactly. The primary purpose of nuclear weapons is to intimidate other nations, and they can’t be intimidated if they have no idea you have them.
But you might not want to intimidate them right now.
As mentioned in the OP, Canada would be in a good position to build our own nukes. We have domestic sources of uranium, and a robust civilian nuclear industry and research community. Give them the go-ahead, and I’m pretty sure we’d have at least as good a bomb as North Korea within a few years.
But who would we be trying to deter? If anyone but the US tries to invade us, the US will curb-stomp them for us. The only country we’d ever need to deter would be the US itself.
And how would the US react to Canada casually mentioning, “Oh, yeah, yanks, btw, we’re a nuclear power now, just fyi!”? Sanctions that would devastate our economy overnight, guaranteed.
So we’d never mention those nukes until the damage from sanctions was considered less of a problem than an immanent invasion by the US.
I’m sure there’s other countries in the world that have similar situations.
“The whole point of this machine is lost if you KEEP IT A SECRET; why didn’t you tell the world?”
Could anybody build up a working nuclear weapons program without testing at least one? And the rest of the world is very very good at detecting nuclear weapons tests.
I wonder if there is another group? The group that has not built a nuke yet but could in short order (some months) if they were of a mind to. Places like Japan or Germany. They certainly have the know-how and probably have a stash of weapons grade uranium or plutonium somewhere.
Well, sort of. You could make a bomb, but you wouldn’t actually be sure if it genuinely worked.
First off, Israel is THE classic undeclared nuclear state. They’ve never said they have them, but the South Africans worked with them on their own bomb (which they’ve subsequently destroyed and renounced), and they’ve got the nuclear technology and industrial base, the fissile material (from that nuclear power industry), and the motivation. Common wisdom has it that they have 100 or so nuclear weapons, probably fairly advanced ones like boosted fission bombs.
It’s probably worth mentioning that the #1 hurdle to developing nuclear weapons is fissile material availability. This means weapons-grade uranium (~90% or so U-235) or weapons-grade plutonium (>93% Pu-239, <7% Pu-240). The issue here is that enrichment is a BIG process- during WWII, the US employed 50,000 workers at Oak Ridge, TN just for processing and enriching uranium, and another 45,000 at Hanford, WA to produce plutonium. While the cost and effort has undoubtedly gone down since then, it’s still not a trivial undertaking to enrich fissile material, and something that nations can’t just casually undertake, even in 2024.
There’s an old nuclear weapons guide that I can’t seem to find online from about 15-20 years ago that among other things, goes into what nations did and didn’t have them.
The takeaway that’s relevant to this thread is that pretty much all the Western democracies could have them in short order if they so chose, especially those with nuclear power industries, as those often have some degree of enrichment capability as part of the industry, since nuclear reactor fuel has to be enriched a small amount (3-5%) to work in reactors. Some of these nations they speculated may have gone so far as to actually do a lot of the design without actually testing or assembling anything. Basically they suspect that places like Japan, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, and Iran are all capable of producing nuclear weapons relatively quickly.
So eight declared states (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea), one widely suspected, but undeclared state (Israel), and another nine or so (Japan, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, and Iran) could develop them very quickly if they so chose.
The average layman, sure. But a national-level nuclear program? They could absolutely do that- it’s what the US did in fact. The design for Little Boy was never tested before it was used in combat over Hiroshima. The Fat Man implosion design was tested beforehand however, and that’s what the Trinity test was.
Never mind, just read the post above mine.
For other reading,the VELA 1979 incident.
An Israeli test? Joint with South Africa?
Note that a gun type nuclear device is simple (for some degree of simple) to design and build. The Hiroshima bomb was a gun type and was never tested beforehand.
And was huge and crude. Building one that can fit in a missile is a different matter.
But a missile isn’t the only way to deploy a nuke. Sure, if you want to hit the other side of the planet, fine, but I only want to hit Detroit. We could do that with a truck, if we really had to.
More reading, Kalahari Test site in South Africa.
the NUMEC Affair in 1977-78 in shaping suspicions about possible Israeli involvement in the VELA matter.[7] Shortly after President Carter took office, he asked the NSC to conduct a quiet investigation for him to find whether Israel had obtained 100-200 kilogram of highly enriched (weapons-grade) uranium from the NUMEC plant in Apollo, PA, a private company whose owner, Dr. Zalman Shapiro, was a supporter of Israel. Carter’s request referred to a series of investigations whether NUMEC diverted significant quantities of highly enriched uranium to Israel in the mid-1960s. Those investigations took years, without leading to any indictments.[8] Mathews had trouble getting access to the records at CIA and FBI until I “had a handwritten note literally from [the] president…So I carried this note around, my hall pass, and this time they did talk, and the first thing that was most clear was that neither agency had spoken to the other, and they were principally concerned about keeping what they knew from the other. I mean, it was extraordinary. But I came back with some pretty clear, conclusions from it. My conclusion was that the material did come from the Apollo Plant in Pennsylvania and that we had pretty good evidence.” In retrospect, Mathews noted, “it really was very relevant when…VELA happened, because it had semi-leaked, not the report that I brought back, but the whole subject.” Despres noted, however, that he“thought that the focus on NUMEC was…unproductive” because “the Dimona reactor had the more significant stores of fissile material [Plutonium] for the weapons program.”
‘Weapon grade” highly enriched uranium (HEU) is greater than 80% 235U is very difficult and expensive to produce, requiring dedicated enrichment and processing facilities to separate it from other isotopes of uranium and enormous amounts of energy provided continuously for months on end; nobody just has that material sitting around in a ‘stash’.
Weaponizable plutonium (239Pu) is easier to produce because it can be chemically separated and is better for making ‘simple’ implosion devices but is really dangerous to handle. Keeping a stockpile just sitting around for some nebulous contingency is unlikely, although Japan has had enough plutonium-containing material unaccounted for (MUF) in its nuclear power production facilities to build 10-20 weapons if they could collect and purify it. Doing so completely in secret seems unlikely but could be done with a modest number of technical experts and facilities.
Building weapons is another thing entirely; although the fundamentals of nuclear weapon design are readily available and the computer codes to simulate potential designs are no longer secret and can be run on a moderately powerful desktop computer in a few hours, the details of reliable initiation systems are still closely guarded secrets that would require a lot of engineering effort (or espionage) to work out. It is certainly plausible but despite somewhat fantastical Tom Clancy novels it isn’t something a single engineer is going yo put together in a few weeks. There is also the issue of ‘boosting’ (invomplete nuclear fusion to amplify yield) which is crucial in a compact, high yield weapon, which requires access to significant quantities of tritium that can’t be held in reserve for years due to its ~12.3 y half-life, so you would need to have a way to collect tritium from your nuclear production system and separate it from its 3He decay product that will poison a prompt fusion reaction.
‘Subscale’ testing of the initiation system can be done with an inert tamper and pit, which us much of the concern about reliability but only actual live testing of a complete design will give you a good estimate of energetic yield and assurance that there isn’t a critical flaw in the design that would result in a ‘fizzle’. Even if you are copying a weapon design from bought or pilfered plans and specifications, testing is crucial to know that your expensive apocalypse toy works, and also demonstrates the viability of the device for deterrence purposes. Without that, your opponent may well concluded that threats or insinuations if your deterrence capability are just bluster and press you into a corner of having to use the device on the battlefield whether you intended to or not.
Many people think of nuclear weapons as just really more powerful versions of conventional ordnance but they are really the would’s worst suicide bomb because use against another nuclear-armed opponent begets escalating response, and there is no plausible endgame where “cooler heads will prevail” once nukes start exploding over conventional military forces or critical industrial facilities, as aptly and consistently demonstrated by decades of strategic wargaming simulations.
Stranger
Yeah. Back during the Cold War I recall the military saying they’d basically given up on the “tactical nuclear weapon” concept, because every time they wargamed it the result was an escalation to a full nuclear exchange.
Is it beyond the realm of possibility that these countries (e.g. Japan or Germany) were able to obtain weapons grade materials from the US or some other nuclear power? It would not surprise me to find they manged that if they did not refine the stuff themselves.
For more intrigue…Where have we seen Mossad front company recently?
Says alleged but …
If you mean through official channels govt to govt it’s theoretically possible. But the political risks on both sides are considerable if the exchange was leaked.
If you mean an illicit diversion of e.g. US material to another country’s spooks, the NUMEC cite upthread suggests thats exactly how Israel’s weapons program got started.
As @Stranger_On_A_Train indirectly said, all the ingredients have half-lives with tritium being the most limiting. Which means any transfers need to be ongoing to keep the fissile inventory fresh.
Overall my take is it’s a theoretical possibility but implausibly impractical in the free democratic parts of the world. Could the Russians do something like that with the e.g. Belarusians? Sure. But easier to give them completed weapons or just stage yours run by your people on their soil.