In Japan and South Korea there is deepening concern over the reliability of long-time American security guarantees – whether the U.S. will come to their aid in the event of a war. This has been turbo-charged by Donald Trump’s tough treatment of traditional U.S. allies, which has some in Tokyo and Seoul calling for a reassessment of their non-nuclear policies.
Eh. There’s nothing too crazy about developing from scratch. The hard part is generating your first batch of enriched uranium. A physics grad student could probably design a basic nuke. The US actually ran a test to that effect decades ago; a couple of physicists with no specialization in the nuclear side of things, and using only publicly available material, were able to design an implosion-type device. The expert consensus was that it would have worked just fine.
The main technological hurdle, besides enrichment, is making sure all of the explosives trigger at the exact same moment and that can be tested inexpensively without a core being present.
Making it is actually so easy that a boy scout once did it in a shed, the difficult part is that, outside of extreme circuimstances, you require a sample in order to make more of it.
He made a neutron emitter, not a nuclear fission bomb. A great way to turn your back yard into a Superfund site, not so great as a nuclear deterrent.
Enriched Uranium is Enriched Uranium.
To get the uranium for the first bomb, you can always do what Israel did - have your spies literally steal it from US nuclear facilities.
Buying the blueprints would still remove the need for extensive testing, but you make a good point. After I posted the comment, I actually wondered about how hard it would be since there is so much information about nukes publicly available.
Eh, you would still want to test. Even buying from an ally, there’s no telling if the blueprints haven’t been sabotaged to be ineffective or maybe just inefficient. (Maybe your ally supports you having nukes, but wants to make sure their nukes are better.)
But even beyond that, when you test a nuke, you’re not just testing the design. You’re testing your materials. You’re testing your manufacturing capability. You’re testing every bit of the vast production process that went into making the weapon. And you’re testing your own technical ability to design nuclear weapons. Getting blueprints would be beneficial, but there’s no real substitute to designing your own bomb optimized to your own available materials and production processes.
If you donated some money strategically you could probably get a copy of the US nuclear secrets to accidentally fall out of Mar-a-Lago’s bathroom window.