With all the news coming out of North Korea lately, I’ve been wondering why so few countries have nuclear weapons and what it is that makes it so difficult. To see if the question has already been asked I tried searching on things like “make nuclear bomb”, but my searches all fail with a message box asking me if I want to download search.php. Other searches work just fine.
That got me to wondering if in this post 9-11 atmosphere there weren’t some phrases that trigger some kind of red flag. If so then surely something like “How do I make an atomic bomb” would set off friggin’ fireworks.
Does this board look for anything like that or am I being overly (or underly) paranoid?
Notice to FBI, CIA NSA, etc: I am **not **interested in making bombs, nuclear or otherwise.
First of all, you need the appropriate specifications. Second, you need the appropriate materials. Third, you need to construct it to absurdly close tolerances. Fourth, you need to use materials that will give it a stable shelf life.
Even if you do all of that there’s no guarantee that it will work. And, of course, there’s the practical impossibility of obtaining Plutonium or Uranium 235, and if you’re interested in H-bombs it is next to impossible to afford the amount of Tritium you are going to need.
There’s a reason that it cost so much to make the first one. There’s a reason why it costs so much to make new ones. And that’s with all of the engineering and capital expenditures in equipment and training. Realistically, only nations can build them, and only nations with the bomb can help those without it build one.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Japan, Germany, Canada, and other similar advanced industrialized countries could all build nukes in short order if it were a priority for them, without any outside assistance (assuming access to a source of uranium, but all these countries have various reactors and obviously can get raw uranium without problems). The principles on which fission bombs operate aren’t exactly secret.
You have to get the uranium, and either build a reactor to make plutonium, or a plant to enrich the uranium. There are two bomb types. A crude, dangerous gun-type bomb is the simpler type; half the fuel is shot down a tube towards the other half. In the other type, you have a hollow sphere of fuel that has to be crushed right inward into a ball by explosives, and not just blown up into vapor or split into pieces. The explosion has to be spherically symmetric, which means you need predictable explosives, carefully timed detonation and you have to shape the shockwave with specially shaped “explosive lenses.” Those are the tricky parts I’m aware of.
I’d add that Pu-239 has some weird properties and is difficult to work with. It corrodes quickly if exposed to a normal atmosphere and has six different phases in its solid state. It also produces a noticeable amount of decay heat (1.9 watts/kg).
So now that my thread has been moved to GQ let me flesh out the question.
America managed to make a nuclear bomb some 60 years ago using slide rules for calculations. Considering all the advancements in technology the problem can’t be one of engineering. (Or is it?)
The problem seems to be one of obtaining the raw materials. Still those raw materials were available to us decades ago, so what is it that keeps these nuclear club wannabes from obtaining the materials?
This question just came up on another thread. My advice: read up on it. Get richard Rhodes’ books on the fission bomb and on the hydrogen bomb. search the Internet. Get books on it. read Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears” and Frederick Forsyth’s “The Fourth Protocol.”
Basically, building a bomb is easy if you have enough fissile material and you don’t care how big it is. The classic “Uranium gun” bombused in Little Boy was described in the encyclopedia I had as a kid. They didn’t even bother to test the concept before they dropped it (the Alamogordo A-bomb test was to verify the much more complex “implosion bomb” design of the type used in Fat Man). When the Soviets were first building their bombs, their scientists wanted to skip the Uranium Gun and go directly to the more complex stuff, since they were certain it would work, but Stalin overruled them. As Rhodes pointed out, every nation that’s tried to build an atomic bomb has succeeded on the first try.
The problem is, that basic design is wasteful of fissile material, is big and klunky, and doesn’t give you anywhere near the bang for the buck other designs give you. So you do things to cut down on the amount of material you need and improving the yield by adding particle sources and accelerators and more complex assemblies like imploding hollow spheres, and throw in initiators and “spark plugs”. You make the yields better and the sizes smallwer and the bombs lighter, and you can use less fissile material in each bomb, so you can build more of them. That’s the stuff that’s touchy on its machining and calculation, and is classified. Building a specifically Enhanced Radiation Weapon, or one that optimizes EMP, or acts as a “bunker buster”, or is a good initiator for a fusion bomb takes careful calculation and a lot of modelling, since it’s hard to do it by trial and error.
To make the appropriate nuclear materials you need what are called breeder reactors, which are specifically designed to create Plutonium (which if I recall involves irratiating Uranium). To make Plutonium you need enriched Uranium, concentrated far in excess of what is necessary to run your average pressurized water reactor. That requires gas diffusion (or some other complicated process), extremely high speed centrifuges, and lots of time.
Since either of them are all but impossible to hide from watchdog groups like the IAEA, it’s almost impossible to do it without being in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which most countries have signed). That leads to sanctions, international showdowns, and sometimes acts of war (see Israel’s attack on the reactor at Osirak in Iraq in the early 1980s). The countries that have the most to gain by making a bomb are the same countries with nothing to lose by doing so, which is why Iran and North Korea are working on them.
Most countries simply find that it’s not worth the trouble. Libya repudiated them, South Africa turned theirs in years ago, and virtually everybody else is allied with someone who already has them (the five permanent Security Council members, India, Pakistan, and allegedly Israel).
Well, it wasn’t just slide rules that built the bomb. It was an absolutely huge undertaking. One estimate pegs the cost of the Manhattan Project at about $20 billion in today’s dollars. Link. That’s a lot of slide rules. Wiki says that as many as 130,000 people were involved in the program, too.
I did a thesis on China’s nuclear weapons program. Sadly, the precise details escape my memory, but basically, the Soviet Union provided substantial technical assistance until about 1960, at which time the two countries had a falling out. This technical assistance included things like a reactor, processing facilities, refining equipment, and engineers who knew what they were doing. (China has its own source of uranium.) The only things really held back were the actual detailed plans for a bomb and working prototype of a bomb. Even with all that assistance, which began around 1957 or so (my memory fails me as to the precise date), it wasn’t until 1964 – and four years of work independent of the USSR – that China was able to build and test its first bomb. And this was a really, really major effort by China, along the lines of mobilizing large numbers of Chinese in a Great Leap Forward style of campaign.
I recall that the major hurdles included a bottleneck in being able to process enough fissile material into usable stuff (if one is building a bomb from scratch, you can only process so much material through any given refinement process, and developing the metallurgical (sp?) and machining processes to make use that the stuff that goes boom is precisely made so it doesn’t fizzle.
As far as hiding the process, keep in mind that a lot of the technologies used to build bombs are not available at the Home Depot. The IAEA and all the nuclear power authorities tend to keep a close eye on these technologies and dual-use materials. Building a facility to handle nuclear material is not something that can really be done in secret due to spy satellites and other intelligence methods.
Enrichment technologies are BIG operations, required large and specific (and easily identified) pieces of space- and energy-intensive equipment and a lot of specializedc materials and knowledge. It’s really hard to hide a few hundred gas centrifuges, or the fact that you’re canvassing physics grads to find folks who can do resonant isotope separation, or chemists willing to take your pitchblende and make uranium hexafluoride out of it.
You don’t like reading thrillers, so I won’t recommend that you read Forsyth’e Fist of God, where he describes in considerable detail how a state bent on making its own enrichment facility (a somewhat fictionalized Iraq) while keeping it hidden.
Drive past your nearest nuclear reactor. See how big it is? Next, drive past Oak Ridge National Laboratory. See how big it is?
Now, take the two of them and try to hide them. While you’re at it, keep all of your scientists under lock and key and shamefully coerce them into working in total secrecy, because if any of them have a crisis of conscience the secret is blown. In fact, that is exactly what happened with our nuclear program and (again, allegedly) Israel’s. Someone always gives up the goods.
One other thing: make sure your technology transfer stays on the low-low for at least as long as it takes you to reveal your fait accompli to the world. Once you have the bomb you’re in a better position than you are before you finish. And you will need some technology transfer, unless you intend to reinvent the wheel.
I agree, it is NOT easy. the biggest problem is enriching the uranium 9or extracting plutonium). You are dealing with stuff that is dangerously radioactive, and must be handled by robots. And, it is no easy task to machine plutonium into the precise shapes need ed to form the bomb. I suspect that saddam Hussein could have eventually built a few bombs, but at a huge cost in lives. But losing a few people never deterred him.
I think a vaguely valid analogy would be ‘how difficult is it to build an automobile’?
General automtive principles are well-known and the parts are readily available. HOWEVER, what if you were to build an automobile from scratch? As AirmanDoors mentioned, there are many parts requiring precise tolerances.
As far as raw materials (in the case of the automobile) iron ore would be the vital concern. Even then you would have to figure out a way, to extract the iron from the iron ore (blast furnaces, etc) and then you would have to determine how to make the refined iron stronger, rust-resistant, more durable, etc. Then you have to mold that iron (which is now steel) into parts which must fit together with extreme precision. Well, rather than continuing with this autombile analogy, I think you get the picture.
For atomic bomb manufacturing ‘from scratch’, the raw material you must start with is Uranium 235 which is always found with the much more plentiful Uranium 238. Separating one from the other is extremely difficult because this has to be done by a physical process. (There is no way they can be separated chemically). Imagine if you will, separating baseballs of 2 different weights (235 grams and 238 grams). This would be very difficult to do, particularly when the 238 gram baseballs far outnumber the 235 gram ones. Now imagine doing this at the atomic level. Rather difficult isn’t it?
mks57
When you say Plutonium has 6 different phases in its solid state, do you mean allotropes?
The six phases are six different crystalline arrangements of a single chunk of plutonium made up mostly of (I assume_) a single isotope… SF editor/writer used to claim that it was impossible to machine plutonium to a cwertain tolerance because the heat of machining would tend to shift it out of that phase into one of a different density, screwing up your efforts. I never looked into his math and physics, but the fact that we’ve got bombs using precision-machined plutonium seems to be evidence that it;s nmot impossible.
Hi… ummm… let me have some of those porno magazines… large box of condoms… a couple of those panty shields and a couple of gas centrifuges and one of those disposable enemas.
In a previous life I worked as a contractor for the Department of Energy. I worked at a facility that consisted of over 100 buildings and employed 2000 people. Our primary mission was to design, develop, and test the triggering mechanism that goes in nuclear bombs. Suffice to say, the triggering mechanism alone is an extremely complex device.
