3rd World Threat of Nuclear Weapons

[ThomWV]

My wife mentioned something about some fellow in Iraq having been found with a computer that held plans, or the beginning of plans, or whatever it was, of a nuclear weapon for Allah. This apparently constitutes a nuclear weapons program.

I thought about that for a moment and I thought about the capabilty of our space-based surveillance systmes. And then this occured to me. When we got ourselves into the nuclear weapons business we had to build Oak Ridge, Hanford, the Nevada Test Site, and Los Alamos. We're talking about the employee of 60,000 people, real estate to the tune of maybe 1,500 square miles if memory serves me. This little endeavor cost us roughly 10% of the country's power production (electricity) for the years the bomb was being built too, in case you didn't know it.

So tell me, has technology improved to the extent that one guy in Iraq with a computer can be as productive as our entire Manhattan Project was? Could this possibly have in any way have been a threat to us? And even as inadequate as our intelligence was, as we are told (I'm not sure there is a single thing wrong with our intelligence), you would have to think that if a credible threat was emerging someone would have noticed. After all, would they not at the very least have to built a complex to rival the one we needed for our first three bombs?

Thom

[Rick Myers]

1. Not at all

All you'd need is a decent machine shop, a small lab and a safe place to store stolen fissile material. The plan for the Little Boy-type bomb could be built in a well-equipped home machine shop! It's the least effective design, but it's still a Bomb. The hardest part would be getting the radioactive materials needed.

Now, these bombs would be big and cumbersome, but they would work.

Fat Man type bombs and reducing the size so that they could be delivered by missile or airplane require a whole lot of further effort.

on edit:

Little Boy was a 'cannon' design, slamming two pieces of material together to get a reaction. Fat Man was a spherical 'compression' device requiring precise design and timing electronics.

Making anything 'deliverable' is the hardest part. But a device that could fit into a shipping container is possible without too much research and development. Of course, handling radioactive materials is NOT as simple as handling eggs...

[kalian]

2. Correct....

there is NO need to build a Los Alamos type facility for nuclear
weapons' construction.