If you need uranium to make a nuclear weapon and uranium is a fairly rare substance is there a practical limit to the number of nuclear weapons the human race can create?
During the maximum numbers of the Cold War I believe there were about 50’000 nuclear weapons worldwide, ranging from suitcase nukes to city-busting superbombs, did creating all these weapons put any noticable dent in the amount of uranium etc in the world?
This thread was inspired by a discussion with a friend about the possibility of a new Cold War style nuclear arms-race in the future and I wondered if humanity could just keep churning out nuclear weapons or not.
Thanks!
Well there is a limit on the amount of energy that we have. We can make atoms with partical accelerators but it would use more energy that what you would get from a nuke
Uranium is not rare. During WWII it was thought that perhaps the US could control the world supply (particularly mines in Belgian controlled Africa) and have a monopoly that way. However that notion was dispelled after it became apparent that it’s not all that difficult to find.
Refining it to weapons grade material is the hard part.
Most nuclear weapons use plutonium which can be extracted from spent uranium fuel rods from reactors or produced in breeder reactors.
Probably millions of warheads could be produced with the nuclear material available and the current miniturized designs.
Theoretically there is, in practicality does it matter?
There are also a number of other elements that can be used to produce nuclear weapons, including thorium and hafnium.