I just saw the report that Iraq could assemble a nuclear weapon within a few weeks if they could get enough weapons grade material. Correct me if im wrong, but isn’t that a rather crucial/difficult step? The idea behind an atom bomb is pretty easy to understand, building the facilities to get the materials you need is not. I imagine ANY country with a couple of Nuclear Physics Phd’s could put together a bomb if they were handed a truckload plutonium.
My question is: am I right in thinking this report is just a scare tactic? I suppose the report is accurate, but it makes it look like getting weapons grade material is just an afterthought when it’s actually,probably the most difficult step.
Quintas: You’re right, it is the hard part. Unfortunately, it’s the only hard part of the process, depending on what kind of a weapon you want (an ICBM capable of busting a missile silo with 90% efficient usage of fissile material is harder to make than a nuclear truck bomb that only achieves 1% efficiency and mainly just spreads the fissile material around). That’s why we’ve been so keen on preventing Iraq from getting certain kinds of nuclear reactors: It is possible to manufacture plutonium from uranium witht the right facilities. As far as we know, Iraq does not possess such facilties.
Iraq may, however, possess plutonium anyway. Some rogue nations, like Russia, have been in the business of selling certain materials to the right buyers. So do we know for certain Iraq does not have the materials? No. Would it be worthwhile to slap the rest of the world in the face by invading Iraq now? Probably not. Will His Shrubbery do it anyway? Only time will tell.
IIRC, one needn’t be a phd to build a nuke (fission). i think that an engineer and a physics undergrad could throw one together pretty easily. Actually, i think that a skilled machinist could. all of the theory is out there, methinks, and it seems like a simple process, and it’s just needful for one to get the uranium/plutonium, whatever. again, iirc, in the mid 70s some college kid in NY built one without the fissionable material for a science fair and it created quite a stir.
HowStuffWorks.com will tell you how to make a fusion or fission bomb in general. The only difficult thing is getting the weapons grade fuel, which is fortunately very, very expensive and difficult. A Hiroshim type bomb involves shooting the two parts of the fissionable material (I forget whether Hiroshima was Uranium 238 or Plutonium, IIRC Hiroshima (Little Boy) was U238 and Nagasaki (Fat Man) was Plutonium, or vice versa) together down a tube so the critical mass comes together quickly. The first two bombs were only 8 to 15 percent efficient, meaning that most of the fissionable material did not undergo fission.
“HEADLINE: Saddam is only 3 days away from putting a man on the moon! All he needs is a Saturn V and a launch facility. Bombing begins tomorrow” :smack:
Building an particularly efficient bomb is not. Consider the level of technology available to the Americans 1942-1945. No computers, no precedents, only a shaky idea of radiation safeguards etc, but they were able to build a couple of city-busters, maybe 9 kilotons yield. The 1+ megaton monsters casually deployed on modern ICBMs are products of advanced engineering, and such engineering is harder to come by than a few kilos of plutonium or enriched U235. Precision detonators and switches are required, to name two components, neither of which is available by mail-order (we hope).
Nowadays, the theories of atomic explosions are well established (no reinvention of the wheel required), safeguards can be put in place so your sceintiest don’t drop dead in the middle of the program, Uranium refinement procedures are well documented, and a typical Pentium IV has more computing power than all 1945 machines combined. How hard would it be for a truly determined nation to slap together some small 1-10 kiloton city-busters? Pakistan, not the wealthiest nation in the world, managed to pull it off. Nuclear programs are expensive, though, and to set one up you either need a sizable GNP (USA, England, France, India to some extent), serious foreign financial aid (Israel) or a dicatorial government able to spend money at will with disregard for the comfort of the citizens (USSR, China, Pakistan and possibly Iraq).
Assembling a handful of small nukes isn’t all that difficult, but maintaining them is a nightmare. Plutonium is corrosive and super-deadly and over the next few decades, we’ll see the charming effects of warhead breakdown in the former USSR. If a determined nation pursued a modest Uranium-only program, they could easily assemble enough small nukes to toast any number of enemy cities. At this stage, the question is will the Americans let Iraq follow this course, and can it be stopped at all?
IIRC you could achive hydrogen fusion through conventional explosions - perhaps very massive amounts more so then you could pack on a missle but it is possible and requires no fissionable material
Also another factor is the delivery system - currently the farthest reaching missles Iraq has are scuds and are fairly inaccurate at their max range.
Building a nuclear bomb is NOT trivial. It is exceedingly difficult. It is only simple in concept. Here, I’ll tell you how to do it:
Take a sphere of plutonium of just under critical mass, wrap explosives around it, and detonate it. Mass compresses, goes critical, and <boom>. That’s how ‘Fat Man’ was built in WWII.
Make a cylinder with a hole in the middle out of uranium. This cylinder should be just barely subcritical. Make a plug of uranium, and shoot it into the hole. With the added mass, it goes supercritical. <boom>. That’s how ‘Little Boy’ worked.
So it must be simple, right? It’s not. The broad strokes of building a nuke were known when the Manhattan project started, and it still took years and billions of dollars to figure out how to do it.
For instance, you need the right kind of explosives and the right kind of detonators to make a shaped charge that compresses the plutonium. Get it wrong even to the nth decimal point, and your ‘nuclear bomb’ just turns into a dirty conventional bomb blowing pieces of plutonium all over the place.
Each tiny piece of the puzzle is classified. The government worked for years just to perfect the triggers that fire the detonators that set off the explosive. The explosives themselves are exotic and have to be shaped exactly right. The detonators have to react with extremely high speeds and their design is classified.
Saddam has the technical capability to build a bomb, and he already has a functioning design. That’s why it would only take him several months to build a bomb if he had the fissile material.
It took him ten years, employing 40,000 scientists and technicians, to get his nuclear program to that point. It’s not easy.
Ehhh…for the plutonium implosion type, yeah, there are still technical difficulties even after you have the plutonium. For the uranium “gun” type mentioned…well, the first plutonium implosion device was test-fired in the “Trinity” test in the New Mexico desert, months before one was dropped on Nagasaki.
But the first uranium gun-type bomb was tested by dropping the thing on Hiroshima.
As far as the years and billions of dollars spent in the Manhattan Project regarding uranium bombs, most of that was spent…figuring out how to separate out the U-235. In other words, getting the weapons grade material was the hard part. It’s true they had to figure out the exact size of a critical mass of uranium, but my impression is that these days anyone with access to a decent university library could find that out.
Iraq Watch has a nice semi-technical article on Iraq’s Nuclear Weapon Program.
Making enriched uranium seems to have been a major hurdle for Saddam.
Just above a diagram of the Iraqi bomb is this interesting statement:
– Of course this is the internet, and the site might just be pushing garbage. Sure doesn’t feel like it though.
No, building a bomb is an ordered process in which you must have the fissionable material before you can machine it and construct the weapon. You can’t assemble the housing and the explosive shell, and then just slip the isotopes in at the last second.
This is way off topic, however: Who is this we you refer to ? Do you intend to go forth and bust a cap in Saddam’s ass yourself, or are you just so fearful of the remote possibilty of intercepting a nuke that you would sooner send thousands of other people to their deaths than consider finding a diplomatic solution to the problem ?
This sonofa bi%$^H has made talked out of both sides of his mouth long enough. The world would be better off without him.
He has passed the point of deserving the benifit of the doubt.
When ever we get close to him he wants to allow talks about arms inspectors. OK. Let’s send some GI’s up his ass with dection equipment and see what he has.
Jaybee, the question here isn’t “Should the United States invade Iraq?”, which would be more of a Great Debates question; the question is “Which part of building a nuclear weapon poses the greatest technical challenge?” Admittedly the original post itself had some political overtones to it, but let’s try to stick to the technical facts, and debate their political implications in the appropriate forum.