I think about nine nations actually have nukes. US, UK, France, China, Russia, Pakistan, India, Israel, north Korea. South Africa had them and got rid of them.
But what nations could build them on a reasonable timescale if they wanted them? My understanding is that aside from deterrence north Korea is building them to either sell the weapons or sell the know how to build them. They have already tried to help Syria, Iran, Libya and Myanmar build nukes. Can pretty much any nation with several billion to spend just hire north Korea to help develop the domestic infrastructure? Iran has a decent sized economy and an educated population but they still don’t have them after years of trying.
Let’s see… of countries who don’t already have nukes, pretty much any country that does nuclear waste reprocessing and/or enrichment could make plutonium, and at least 2 countries that I can think of produce significant amounts of uranium and are technologically advanced enough to do it.
Click on that NPR link and there’s a tab which lists countries that have the potential to develop nuclear weapons. That’s an excellent resource.
Correction – there’s no evidence that I know of that Iran has had an active program to build a nuclear weapon since 2004. There’s been media reports about U.S. intelligence estimates that conclude that Iran appeared to have stopped that development program somewhere around 2003 or 2004, and apparently hasn’t resumed it.
Keep in mind that having a nuclear program is not the same as having a nuclear weapons program, not more than having, say, ephedrine in your house means that you must be running a meth lab. Enriched uranium could have peaceful uses or non-peaceful uses, and simply enriching uranium – while very suspicious – is not the same as trying to build a nuclear weapon.
The answer is that none of them can today. However some would have likely more success than others if they began a project.
Nuclear weapons are a fairly specialised field and some of the technical aspects are highly classified, and you are going to have to discover the secret yourself, nobody is going to help you.
At the same time you have to build/adapt infrastructure and train personnel.
So, Germany and Japan could probably do it in a few years from the time of decision to so make, although both would face horrendous political pressure far before they got near success.
Italy, Sweden might need a few more years still.
I think Australia, Brazil and S Korea have reasonable chances of success.
Of course more nations have failed at the task than sicceeded.
Canada, obviously, could build a nuclear weapon as easily as any nation.
Of course it’s POLITICALLY impossible, but technically, it could be easily accomplished.
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Of course more nations have failed at the task than succeeded.
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What nations have* failed *to build a nuclear weapon? Iraq, I guess, was trying but Israel bombed it. Who else?
Constructing a basic fission bomb is not a huge secret. It requires the right materials and a LOT of money. Countries like Canada, Japan, Australia, or Italy have everything they need to build nuclear weapons.
Yeah, I think most countries, certainly most western industrialized countries COULD build one if they really wanted too, and if their own internal as well as external politics didn’t prevent them from doing so. Certainly Canada, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Australia and the like could do it if they really wanted too. Building one is not especially hard, and even getting the materials isn’t impossible to do if you have a nuclear power program and the money to put into the effort. You don’t even need to test the things, since a lot of the testing data is available (and really testing is to refine your design at this point and make it smaller, not brute force build one that works).
I know, personally, 8 or 10 folks who could design a bomb* though they might need assistance actually machining parts. They are smart but some of them aren’t very good at the whole building things part. Probably another 10 or so who I’d give >90% chance of being able to design one. There are some technical aspects which are tricky but the ideas are well known and the engineering isn’t exactly a secret either. Heck, the hard part is getting the materials.
Slee
*It is cheating a bit as those 8 or 10 folks all did nuclear research of one form or another. The other 10 did high level science and knew physics well, for example one of the astronomers also knew a ton of nuclear physics…
I’m under the impression that building the bomb itself isn’t too hard, it is getting enough fissionable material to make the bomb work.
However if that is the case, why is North Korea having so much trouble creating warheads small enough to place on top of a missile? Is the tech to create nuclear weapons small enough to fit on a missile a hard technological hurdle to overcome?
Building a bomb isn’t all that hard, but miniaturization takes a lot of testing and development to do, and isn’t nearly as easy because it’s not just the nuclear components but the entire launch system that has to be developed as well. That’s why only a few countries have the things (and only a very few have the ability to MIRV them).
It would take several years to build the infrastructure but yes Canada probably is in the same league as Germany and Japan.
As for failures, lets see Nazi Germany, Yugoslavia, Romania, Francos Spain, Brazil, Argentina.
SOme of them might have succeeded had they continued on, like Brazil, but the Brazilians had a programme for about 20 years before giving it up 1991 and had not succeeded.
Obviously, we (South Africa) could do it if we wanted to - as the OP noted, we’ve done it before, and most of the enrichmentinfrastructure is still around, being used for generating material for research, medical and agriprocessing use. That, plus we have a commercial nuclear reactor and our own uranium. Oh, and a lot of the actual weapons-grade stuff from our decommissioned bombs is still around.
It seems that in fact, there are some significant technical hurdles to overcome. That the theory is simple but the practical aspect much more complicated. It has been disclosed relatively recently that when France build its first bombs, the UK (which had itself received American help) discreetly informed French scientists that they were going at it the wrong way and that it saved France several years of delays. In turn, France shared its know how with Israel, with an identical result.
Yup. They’re still standing on the “no nukes” side of the line but very, *very *close to it and could cross it basically overnight. They’re already producing weapons-grade plutonium (according to Wiki they’re sitting on 9 tonnes of it already), and they’ve got rockets good enough to fling the nasty more or less anywhere on the globe.
They just don’t need to actually build them as they’ve got nuclear deterrence treaties with the US and could probably count on China as well if Best Korea suddenly got crazy. Er. Crazier.