Why would Israel bother with a nuke bomb development program at all? Don’t they just get their nukes from the US?
I don’t think the US has sold nukes to France or the UK, so I doubt they would sell them to Israel. Does the US currently sell/provide nukes to its allies?
Seriously?
IF you were a nuclear power, why would you even think about giving any non-nuclear power a bomb or ten? it’s the one trump card you hold that almost nobody else does. Plus, if you gave them a bomb obviously they’d try (promises or not) to take it apart to see what makes it tick. Plus, it makes your non-nuclear allies dependent on your good will for protection.
The other problem, and the reason why Israel denies (wink, wink) that it has the bomb is the escalation effect. US (and Britain and France, ie. NATO) has the bomb, Russia needs it. NATO and Russia have it, Chin needs it. Then China’s enemy India needs it - meaning India’s frequent enemy Pakistan needs one. (I’m sure Taiwan considered the risks and rewards of their own program)
Pakistan has little interaction with Iran, but if Iran gets one - then Saudi Arabia and Egypt definitely need one, if they have now two rivals in the area (one erratic) that have one - leading to Turkey needing to maintain its level of defensive capability… If they have it, the lesser states - Syria (yikes!) Libya, Iraq, Sudan and Ethiopia would think about it. If North Korea can do it, why not them?
If South Africa had continued as a belligerent white power with a bomb, I’m sure at some time Nigeria would have been forced to consider the need. When the various South American countries were ruled by unreliable military juntas, rumors had Brazil, Argentina, and Chile all supposedly exploring nuclear options.
the western countries like Canada, Japan, Australia, Italy, Spain etc. are secure in the knowledge they are protected by the USA-NATO umbrella and if they absolutely had to rely on their own military, could probably produce a bomb on their own. If South Korea or Japan had the least doubt over US backing they would have the bombs to counter North Korea in no time.
The biggest question with the Manhattan project was “will this actually work like theory says?” Now that the answer is known, the only question is “how exactly do you build one?”
The more countries with atomic bombs, the more likely that a nutjob dictator will use it, or a renegade group will get hold of one. The usual argument against use is that it will bring down the entire world as one to teach you a lesson. If you are already losing a military coup in a hail of gunfire, does that stop you? If you are a fanatic martyr who is willing to kill hordes of innocent people to make a point, nuclear weapons are just a convenient power tool.
Even North Korea is smart enough to understand the problem. It’s interesting to speculate what happens if North Korea used their bomb. It’s a toss-up whether China or the USA would get the privilege of carpet-bombing anything that looked like a military installation, then walking in and taking over.
Absolutely not. There’s some collaboration with Britain on submarine missiles, and there may be emergency protocols for non-US NATO forces to deploy tactical nukes if US forces can’t, but nobody gives or sells nukes to anyone else. Nuclear weapons may be the one thing in the world that are more valuable than money itself: no one who has the ability to make their own nukes could ever need or want to sell them for mere money.
Then you get a radioactive hole in the ground somewhere in North Korea. They may have a handful of bombs, but they don’t have any way of delivering them to an enemy.
Err - The British nuclear defence system consists of four Vanguard-class submarines armed with Trident II D-5 ballistic missiles, able to deliver thermonuclear warheads from multiple independent re-entry vehicles. The Trident IIs are leased to us from the good ole USA, (thanks guys) who do not have any control or veto over their use. They are expected to be in service until 2042 or thereabouts.
The UK has no airborne nuclear delivery capability. The theory is that since no one knows where the subs are, they cannot be preempted.
The US provided technical assistance that allowed its allies (the UK and to a lesser degree, France) to obtain nuclear weapons.That save them years, if not decades of R&D to obtain them using their own internal technical capabilities.
It can be presumed given their advanced nuclear programs and manufacturing bases that:
[ol]
[li]Japan[/li][li]South Korea[/li][li]Canada[/li][li]West Germany[/li][li]Brazil[/li][li]Taiwan[/li][/ol]
Could all assemble at least atomic bombs, if not thermonuclear weapons, within days to weeks.
They no longer need US advice or assistance to do so.
If by “days” you mean “years,” then this is probably a reasonable guess.
They have airliners, don’t they? Cargo ships? Minisubs too. And absolutely fanatical people working for them.
Assuming they don’t just send the individual components of a device out of NK, carried by multiple people, and reassemble it within the target area.
But ICBMs? No, not yet.
How long does it take to get a critical mass’s worth of plutonium, if you are starting with a power generating reactor, but not one specifically set up to facilitate Pu-239 production? Then it’ll take that long, plus a few days of machining the plutonium, etc… to make a device.
One of these things is not like the others.
First of all, while there was some early collaboration between the US and hte UK on the development of nuclear weapons early in WWII (starting with the early 'TUBE ALLOYS", the British predecessor to the Manhattan Project and the eventual transfer of nearly all technical personnel and some material to the United States for integration into that program per the Quebec Agreement), that ended even before the fabrication of weapons. British scientists (both native borne and expatriot from Occupied Europe) were excluded from key positions including anything to do with production. The 1946 McMahon Act prohibited the transfer of US weapon and critical weapon enrichment technology to the foreign powers, including the UK. The UK responded by establishing the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in 1946 which was mandated with developing the domestic capability to produce enriched uranium and plutonium that could be used to fabricate weapons. The first available Pu-239 out of Sellafield was 1952. The first deployable weapon out of this effort was in late 1953. The US and UK have coordinated on various other enabling systems, such as permissable action links, launch platforms, and delivery systems most notoriously the cancelled BLUE STREAK missile, the abort study to deploy a two-stage variant of the ‘Minuteman’ ICBM in Scotland, and of course the Polaris and Trident II programs in which the booster and guidance section was delivered for use by the UK for integration into their boomer fleet and using the domestically developed ET.317 warhead (later upgraded with the Chevaline program) and the British Trident II warhead, the latter of which was developed partly in concern with the W76, but long after the British had established native ability to produce nuclear material and design weapons.
The United States did not aid France in the development of nuclear weapons and vigorously opposed the decision to establish the Force de frappe, as it made France effectively independent of NATO in terms of deterrence ability. I don’t know where you gained the impression that France received technical assistance from the US in the development of their nuclear program, but that is wholly incorrect.
West Germany has not existed since 1991. Canada has an avowed policy against fielding nuclear weapons stemming back from the mid-'Eighties, and while it hosts a number of difference strategic sites at part of NATO (including the ‘backup’ regional headquarters for NORAD), it is entirely dependent upon the United States to field the deterrent force. South Korea has only recently (in the last fifteen years or so) acquired sufficient capability to potentially develop nuclear weapons. I doubt that Taiwan or Brazil has this capability today, and they certainly don’t have the domestic capability to produce a reliable ballistic delivery system. Of all of the nations you list, only Japan could have a potential covert nuclear weapons program capable of being deployed in short order, and such a capability would prove to be highly unpopular with the public.
The notion that even simple fission weapons could be produced, fabricated, and fielded from raw materials in the span of a few days is ludicrous from a logistical standpoint alone. Even a simple pre-designed weapon would take a few weeks to fabricate provided you have the enriched nuclear material, high precision ignition system, and necessary technology to produce the precisely machined components. Fission devices compact enough to be transported by light plane or ballistic missile would likely take years to engineer. Multistage (thermonuclear) weapons would take even longer to develop due to their inherent sophistication, i.e. designing something that blows itself apart only slightly slower than it generates energy.
As for testing, while modern hydrocode and plasmadynamic simulation codes can predict the performance of a design with much greater fidelity than the crude 1-D models used to develop early weapons using high performance commercial computing sytems, there is still considerable engineering judgement on how to set up the boundary conditions and apply these models. Testing is crucial both to validate the assumptions and assure that there are no unexpected phenomena which may interfere with the intended operation of the device. This is why the Department of Defense funded the incredibly expensive National Ignition Facility at LLNL; so such ignition conditions could be studied in a controlled environment without a full nuclear release. (That the facility can also be used to study controlled inertial fusion is an added benefit, but was not the primary driver.)
Stranger
Article I of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is a rather huge roadblock to this, again assuming that the US had any desire for Israel to be a nuclear state. It doesn’t; why would it?
Israel is not a signatory to the NPT, but the US is a signatory of and one of the 5 states recognized as NWS under the NPT.
Quite a while.
It’s not as simple as re-processing the spent fuel from a nuclear power plant. To be useful in a bomb, the plutonium needs to be almost pure PU-239 (at least 90%). Plutonium that is produced in a power plant (with a long refueling cycle) tends to have a very high ~20% concentration of PU-240, which makes it unsuitable for weapons. So, you would have to start out with enough enriched Uranium to be able to run it through the reactor quickly, and then extract the plutonium. And, as mentioned, just doing the engineering is going to take months, if not years.
France has conducted (nearly?) all of its tests at sea (or at least on very small islands.)
It’s a double-secret nuclear program!