I have to second this sentiment. Sure, there’s deterrent value in other countries not knowing whether you have nukes or not… but apparently not very much deterrent value, as evidenced by Iran’s war with Israel. Making sure everyone knows you definitely have them would be worth a lot more deterrent. As for one whistleblower saying that they do have them: Well, if they wanted the world to think they have them when they don’t, that’d be the easiest thing in the world to arrange.
Are there any other countries besides South Africa that are suspected to be nuke capable at some point?
Wasn’t there vague rumors of Argentina developing a nuclear weapon to use as a threat to the UK for the Falklands?
What is “nuke capable?” I think there is a spectrum there.
AIUI, any nation that possesses U-235 is nuclear-capable, since all you need is a strong metal tube and to fire one wedge of U-235 (with some explosive as propellant) down that tube to smash into a waiting block of U-235 so that the two pieces become supercritical when combined as one. That is the Hiroshima design.
It’s also by far the easiest nuclear weapon to make, which is why it is a concern (that terrorists could do it.)
Not quite that easy. As @stranger has pointed out many times, there’s a lot of engineering work, metalurgy, manufacturing skills, and critical other components involved. And, “TIMING IS EVERYTHING”.
Iraq went down the nuclear road under Hussein, bombed by Israel. Syria tried with significant North Korean support; bombed by Israel with significant loss of NK scientists (NK howled about the bombing for 24 hours then abruptly shutup). I’ll look for more after coffee.
Libya had a program for a while. I’m not sure how close they got to engineering an actual device.
States That Had Nuclear Weapons or Nuclear Weapons Programs at One Time:
- Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine inherited nuclear weapons following the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse but returned them to Russia and joined the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon states.
- The apartheid South African government secretly developed a small number of nuclear weapons. South Africa joined the NPT in 1991 and dismantled its entire nuclear weapons program prior to its transition to a multi-racial democracy in 1994.
- Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War but was forced to verifiably dismantle it under the supervision of UN inspectors. The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 under the Bush administration’s rationale of preventing Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. However, Iraq’s nuclear program had remained dormant since its dismantlement in the 1990s and the country did not have ready stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.
- Libya voluntarily renounced its secret nuclear weapons efforts in December 2003.
- The IAEA is seeking clarification from Syria regarding its nuclear program. In 2007, Israel bombed a reactor under construction at Al Kibar. Evidence suggests Syria was constructing the reactor as part of an illicit nuclear weapons effort.
- Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, Sweden, Australia, and Taiwan also once pursued nuclear weapons programs.
Sources: Arms Control Association, Federation of American Scientists, International Panel on Fissile Materials, U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of State, and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
There’s a lot of difficult engineering for an implosion device. Gun devices are much, much easier. Implosion devices are made anyway, because it’s a lot easier to produce weapons-grade plutonium than weapons-grade uranium, and the gun design doesn’t work with plutonium. But if you do somehow have weapons-grade uranium, yes, it’s easy to take it from there.
I could be mistaken, but I believe timing only matters for the Nagasaki-type implosion weapon, which requires all explosive lenses outside the plutonium pit to compress it perfectly together at once.
With the Hiroshima gun-tube design, timing doesn’t matter - once you set off the explosive that propels one chunk of U-235 into the other, it goes off, period.
I think modern computer simulations can predict whether a nuclear weapon will work or not with a very high degree of accuracy. Actual tests are for show.
Yeah, you might want to consider some safety mechanisms. Also, how to ensure the device does go off, reliably and with full yield, under conditions you precisely define. But, if you want a low-tech nuke and have access to plenty of highly-enriched uranium (available at any corner drugstore…), that design is known to work.
The US does use computers to “test” nukes but they are very, very powerful computers. Among the most powerful in the world and hyper expensive. Not something you will find at Best Buy.
True, but countries like Japan or Sweden could probably get their hands on computers like that if they really wanted to. Not that they need to now.
Sort of. You are leaving off things like neutron reflectors, absorbers (slow the neutrons down), neutron generators and required timing. Without these and other additional pieces, your yield will be piss poor (technical term). Perhaps closer to a dirty bomb. The machining must also be precise. Uranium is difficult to work with, extremely hard, dense, and pyrophoric if machining in an oxygen environment. And the pieces that are being explosively assembled to supercritical mass; they spend their time in storage spalling off chunks from localized spontaneous decay. Even the DU practice warhead pieces spall.
The most powerful computers in the world, nowadays, are in fact something you can find at Best Buy. You just buy a lot of them and put them in parallel. The trickier part is in the programming.
Side question: why do they need to be so powerful?
Another side question: with the complexity and access to materials and expertise required, how does North Korea have a nuclear weapon program?
Ahem 
But the answer is, at least partially, sanctions, schmanctions. You need graphite, I mean, “lead pipes”? You got lead pipes. You need machine tools? You got machine tools. You need computer code and missile blueprints? …you get the idea.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181122184042if_/https://projectalpha.eu/un-north-korea-sanctions-panel-releases-2013-report/
Israel also creatively got a lot of stuff in similar ways.
It may be complex, but it’s still 80-year-old technology.
I mean, seriously - a bunch of guys back in the 1940s invented the tech from scratch in three years using slide rules. How hard can it be?