Is building a nuclear weapon tougher than some people think?

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Me and my friends were having this conversation and they think with all the info on the internet out there, that building an atomic bomb would be relatively easy to go do. However, I don't buy this at all, because if it was easy, someone would have done it and used it by now. It seems to me that you have to be incredibly smart to do something like that and probably 99.9% of people, could not do it, otherwise someone would have by now?

Unless I am wrong and it's totally possible?

Not sure about a bomb. But at least one amateur did singlehandedly build a nuclear reactor. And a nuclear bomb is just basically a type of nuclear reactor.

Some stories you cant make up:

Last edited by naturalplastic on 04 Jun 2020, 2:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Where would you and your friends obtain the necessary materials?  Kryton triggers are difficult enough, but the Pu-238 would be virtually impossible to obtain for someone lacking the proper credentials and security clearances.  Even if they did, there is the matter of machining all of the materials just so in order to fit them all together, and to do it without dying from radiation poisoning within the first day or two.

Give it up kid, and stick to video games.

The issue is getting a hold of weapons-grade fissile material in sufficient quantity. Which, aside from being highly regulated, requires a whole bunch of sophisticated tech and know-how to handle properly. But I don't think the device itself is necessarily all that sophisticated. The "Fat Man" bomb was essentially one chunk of Plutonium with a hole in it, into which they launched another chunk of Plutonium (using black powder, of all things), so that the combined mass of Plutonium became large enough to reach critical mass. Boom.

Yeah exactly, where would you get it. Uranium mines I guess?

That's true. Fission bombs come in two flavors. Those made of Uranium (the heaviest natural element), and Plutonium (which is a manmade element). I suppose that you could break into a uranium mine and chip away at the rocks in the tunnels. But plutonium is pretty much unobtainable for a private person. I don't think that even that boy scout could have scrounged it up.

Well, first you contact the FBI, and give them your name, address, and phone number. Then you tell them what you want and why you want it.  Then you sit back and wait for them to drop by for an interview...

It is relatively easy. It is just that no one allows you to use it. Spoil sports!

Easy?  How would you know?

... hello ... FBI ... a live one ...

Oh okay, I thought the best way to get it would be to chip away at the rocks. Or try to steal it after it's already been mined and is still on site there.

You're in luck, Canada is the second largest Uranium mining nation in the world (After Kazahkstan). Unfortunately for you, Uranium-235 (the only naturally occouring fissile isotope of U) makes up about 0.72% of the worlds natural Uranium. So...looks like you'll be chipping for a while.

Or I guess you could turn up with a box of donuts and see if they'll trade you some.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigar_Lake_Mine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McArthur_ ... anium_mine

Yes. Why not? David Hahn (the boyscout) would just call up officials and tell them that he was a college professor who needed stuff for a school project, and they would just give him the stuff (like that shipment of a 100 old smoke detectors) without checking out his identity, and then tell him over the phone how to extract the radioactive substances.

I've heard various stories about people designing and building the non-radioactive components of an atom bomb. I can't seem to track it down, but there was one about a high school physics class constructing a bomb in the '60s or '70s, which they handed over to the US Navy, who added enriched uranium and detonated it in an underground test. Not sure if that's true or not. Here's a less exciting story- https://people.com/archive/a-princeton- ... l-6-no-17/

The title of this next article overstates the case, but it describe an experiment where 3 physics PhDs with no particular expertise in weapons came up with a usable bomb design in 3 years. https://io9.gizmodo.com/this-experiment ... -510618426

It does seem like obtaining and processing the fissile materials is the tough part, not the mechanism of the actual bomb. It's not like any idiot could design it, just that there are plenty of physicists and engineers out there who'd be up to the task.

Uranium is a reasonably common chemical element, but it's not found in conveniently concentrated lumps. Reading around, it looks like most uranium ore has a very low uranium content- less than 1%. There's a few high-quality mines in Canada, Australia and Khazakstan, where it's more like 25%. I'm guessing their security is pretty good. There's a lengthy, energy-intensive industrial process to extract the uranium.

The uranium then has to be "enriched"- increasing the proportion of uranium235, the isotope which undergoes fission, by removing some of the less useful isotopes. This seems to be the part Iran was struggling with, and they're by no means short of good physicists there. If you want plutonium for a bigger bang, you've then got to find a way to irradiate your enriched uranium with deuterium ions.

Oh okay. I just thought that if a nuclear bomb was so easy to build, then others would have tried using them by now.

Shhh! Don't tell anyone else or they will all want to make one!

Well, I've done it! Just finished assembling my home-made nuke. Now, do any of you know where I can score some enriched urani[user has been terminated by drone strike]