No they don’t. They state that Israel was estimated by Vanunnus revelations to have had the ability to make Plutonium for upto 200 bombs. Not that they actually had made it.
I beg to differ. It would be giving a lot of credit to the Iranian regime to say they’re mere religious fanatics. They’re a dictatorship that derives its legitimacy from using an extreme religious rhetoric in the opposite direction of the extreme religious rhetoric coming from the other bank of the Gulf where another dictatorship cloaked in religion exists.
Iran’s government and underground mullahs have repeatedly proven to be pragmatic enough to be parties in a regional stalemate based on restraint from firing ballistic missiles with chemical warheads into the Gulf, Israel or just randomly in every direction.
As someone I don’t remember posted in a similar thread, the main reason Iran wants a nuclear warhead is to be able to say “Fuck you” to the US in Iraq and Syria, and to protect its appendage in South Lebanon from Israel and opposing Western-backed Lebanese factions and politicians.
This is a moot point because this would never happen. That is, no state would announce it had nukes with or without actually having them. It would test one first, because these days it is impossible to keep a nuclear detonation secret. And that would be just as much the point of the detonation: As a way of letting the world find out they now had them (as much as them finding out if their device actually worked). Everyone else would verify it for them without them doing anything more. If Iran suddenly said they did, when they didn’t, they’d be shooting themselves in the foot. It would be seen as unnecessarily aggressive posturing and a decidedly significant change in their foreign policy. Considering they repeatedly still state that the destruction of Israel is one of their nation’s goals this would give Israel a more legitimate stance for a (non-nuclear) first strike against whatever atomic program they did have.
Indeed, nuclear weapons may be the one thing in the world more valuable than money itself. No one who can build their own nukes could ever need or want to sell them to someone else for mere money.
“We’re Here! We’re Nuclear! Get Used To It!” 
Any statement as of fact is dependent on its sources.
“The World Trade Center Buildings collapsed.”
No, someone told me they did.
Here, someone gave plausible information on the amount of Israel’s Plutonium refinement. Do you have a better source?
Neither you nor I is actually inside Israel’s highest levels of strategic defense. However, far more reference sites declare their warhead count to be in the hundreds than in the dozens. If you have some actual evidence, I’d love to hear it, otherwise it’s just dueling Google, and Google supports the larger numbers in this case.
I don’t usually say this but “cite?” I’ve never heard claims that the Indians and Pakistanis who developed their countries’ nuclear weapons were former members of any American or British nuclear weapons program.
Well Rafi Muhammad Chaudhary for one.
ThenIshrat Hussain Usmani spent several years at Oak Ridge, although IIRC after the war.
Google away. Federation of American Scientists, which is whom I had linked to , is one of the most reputable and reliable organisations and Think Tanks out there on strategic issues. Their nuclear notebook, which gives estimates on the size of all nuclear arsenals from time to time is published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.. They include actual nuclear scientists and former military officers (and incase of Dr Bruce Blair, both). So, these guys actually know what they are saying.
So, frankly, I believe them a lot more than some newspaper report.
Pakistan has nuclear weapons. South Africa successfully developed them. At this point, it’s pretty straightforward. You need billions of dollars. You need a large crew of people who keep their mouths shut for long enough - information leaks from a project like this mean international sanctions and the other nations trying to get in the way.
I think it is reasonable to think that the moment the Iranians demonstrate nukes, Saudi Arabia will feel they need them as well in order to demonstrate parity. Saudi Arabia is far wealthier, and probably could develop them in a fraction of the time. They would have to send out talent scouts to get the experts they need - apparently, Pakistan, Iran, India, etc all found people with the right skills somewhere. There’s supposed to be a pool of former Soviet bomb experts who personally have seen the designs to working fission bombs and participated in the assembly of the actual hardware.
So you need some of those guys, and some newly trained folks who have whatever knowledge that nuclear engineering degrees you can get from the United States give you. (Saudi Arabian citizens can get free educations at U.S. universities if they get in, so there are lots of those guys)
And, again, somehow they need to keep their traps shut. Then, you just need to put on order a vast pile of materials - you need lots and lots of machinery to be made somewhere. Probably be easier to make the enrichment equipment inside machine shops in Saudi Arabia instead of ordering them on the international market directly. And, you need mountains of pitchblend or yellowcake or something.
Does Saudi Arabia have Uranium mines?
Anyways, they have the wealth to burn to do this, it’s just a question of getting it all together and doing it, impeded by whatever sanctions are imposed. I mean, sanctioning Saudi Arabia seems like an impractical idea, but I don’t see how such an effort could be organized without other nations hearing about it. The U.S. and the EU would probably feel they have to levy at least symbolic sanctions to show they aren’t going to let a nation get nukes without some consequences.
But I don’t see anything in the linked articles about either of these men working in any American or British nuclear weapons programs. Oak Ridge was involved in the Manhattan Project during World War II but it switched to non-military research after the war.
Not sure if this is what you’re trying to say or deny, but **every **nation that has the bomb acquired it thru **significant **assistance via espionage. Every nation ***but ***the United States that is. And I don’t just mean the USSR, China and the DPRK, but France, India, Pakistan and certainly Israel. Britain can probably lay claim to the least amount of spying as they were in on it with the US from the beginning.
It’s simple economics. Left to their own resources any adequately developed nation would be able to build a fission bomb on their own, but it would add decades and billions to the price tag. The cost effectiveness of spying in terms of nuclear technology is a no-brainer.
Hasn’t Y-12, part of Oak Ridge, always been a part of the U.S. nuclear weapons and reactors agencies? And, per the wiki, hasn’t ORNL been one of the, if not the, place where naval reactors were designed, tested, and experimented upon?
Heck, isn’t there a Doper or two here who works at one of the complexes within Oak Ridge?
As to Israel’s stockpile of nukes (BTW, thanks AK84 for the link to the BAS paper), it seems to me that most of the guesses as to its size are predicated on the idea that Dimona is their only source of weaponizable nuclear material and we have an OK idea of how much plutonium Dimona can feasibly produce per year. But if all of Israel’s warheads are therefore plutonium-using designs, why then did they steal gas centrifuge technology, technology useful for producing enriched uranium? Why is it that acquisition and enrichment of uranium isn’t mentioned as a possible source for Israel’s weaponizable material?
Another thought when reading about Israel’s land-based missiles is that no one seems to think that any of the Jericho line carry multiple reentry vehicles, and I can’t figure out why that’d be the case. Especially if authors mention Russia as a potential target for the deterrent, a country with an on-again/off-again ABM capability.
Given the way things turned out, I dare say this was a bad decision on Ukraine’s part. Almost certainly, Vladimir Putin would not have annexed Crimea or had his minions invade eastern Ukraine if doing so would risk a nuclear war.
Kind of off topic, but how much would a nuke be worth?
Let’s say the US puts up a working nuclear bomb, one that needs to be dropped out of a plane but is otherwise easy to detonate, on ebay. How much would serious bidders bid for it?
According to a little googling, a W76 warhead (which is the most common warhead in the American arsenal) cost around two million dollars apiece to build.
Yes, but the selling price would probably be vastly higher, especially if it’s an open bidding auction and there’s only one such item offered for sale.
A friend of mine worked at ORNL for a short time. He did not work on nukes though. What he worked on was a plan to ship nerve gas from the US to an island in the Pacific ocean so it could be destroyed. They had to plan to ship the gas down normal roads to an airport to ship them to the island. That all worked out and it was done in the late 80s (I think)
No. NK doesn’t nuke SK because the retaliation would be immediate and it would be suicidal. Iran doesn’t nuke Israel because it would probably be geopolitically useless to them, so why would they want to do it?
I don’t think Iran *wants *to nuke Israel at all. It’s probably more likely for Israel to be nuked by Israeli nukes than Iranian nukes. It’s probably more likely for Israel to be nuked by the *British *than by the Iranians.
The problem is that Israelis probably think they are the target of the Iranians, because Israeli politics has a high and increasing statistical incidence of the ethnoreligious crazy. This is what happens when a polity built on quasi-millenarist fanaticism in an absurdly tiny country faces terrible overpopulation; the sane ones tend to leave while the the fanatics stay (or move in from the Diaspora). Israeli politics is pretty far along on an (irreversible?) trajectory into racist insanity.
Well, that’s my read on it, anyway. I admit I’m relying heavily on* a priori *reasoning, which is probably bad.
That said, Iran insists it wants an endogenous nuclear power program, not nuclear weapons as such. I don’t know that former president Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map should be taken all that seriously, and in any case, that was probably more about supporting Hezbollah and a Palestinian reconquest (in theory) than about anything like sudden nuclear devastation.
Israel is ethnoreligious crazy but Iran isn’t? :dubious: Iran is (1.) Primarily Shiite with Sunni neighbors (and don’t think that’s merely a matter of polite theological debate); and (2.) Ethnically Persian with Arab neighbors (and don’t think Islam overrides good old-fashioned bigotry). But even worse, Iran has by now institutionalized its religious values into political values: the system was set up to promote radical Shiite Islam, and political goals have now taken on a life of their own. Never underestimate how illogical religion and politics can be, and when the two are in combination nothing’s off the table. Take for example the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the see-sawing between Catholic and Protestant rulers in England and the Thirty Years War in what’s now Germany.