- The article seems to stop short of a bit of logic. I'm certainly no expert but have been reading extensively on the topic.
TLDR, once you have the uranium, it is still hard to build a bomb that's light and small enough to be fired in a ballistic missile. The Hiroshima bomb (Little Boy), of gun type, is about the simplest thing you can build, and still it weighted 4 tonnes, was 3 m long and 70 cm wide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy). Not because Americans were stoopid, but because it takes a lot of effort to make these things small. It also was very inefficient with it's use of the fissile material - it needed 64kg of highly enriched uranium, most of which didn't react at all, and it's a fundamental limitation of this design. So if Iran really has 600kg of highly enriched uranium, that's enough for 10 of those puppies. 10 too many of course...
The next step up is an implosion device, where conventional explosives compress a blob of fissile metal. That was Fat Man of Nagasaki, and was about as big/heavy as the Little Boy. But used only 4kg of fissile metal for the same bang, roughly. But to make this work is a lot of science that Iran would either need to figure out, or dunno, but from Pakistan or North Korea. And even then it's massive and heavy and doesn't fit on the tip of a ballistic missile. For comparison, modern US warheads weigh around 200-300kg while delivering 20-30x the boom of the WWII bombs.
All of which is to say, just having the uranium is clearly necessary, but far from sufficient from having a weapon you can use.
Still... It seems taking it away by force isn't working, and if anything, confirmed to Iran that it needs it. So... Good luck to the rest of us. And in any case their main target Israel has its own nukes, I'd imagine plentiful, well researched and efficient, bringing us back to MAD, which somehow safely saw us through Cold War.
- I don't trust MAD among religious fanatics, and while I concede that there are various possible places to draw the line, I think "having enough weapons grade uranium to build a bomb" is probably on the wrong side of the line. No matter how hard it is to actually fabricate and deliver a real bomb.
- > I downloaded them all and ran exhaustive AI research queries across the full corpus. What follows is what the documents actually say.
Missing an /s?
- It seems to be serious. This should be treated with extreme skepticism. Probably best to remove this from HN.
- Its also kind of weird, as the article is basically just an executive summary. Did they really need AI to come up with that? Its hardly in the weeds of the details.
- I wonder how much more uranium this is than say israel themselves have???
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_nuclear_weapons#Sto...
> 2008 – 80 intact warheads, of which 50 are re-entry vehicles for delivery by ballistic missiles, and the rest bombs for delivery by aircraft. Total military plutonium stockpile 340–560 kg.[186]
They probably have way more now 18 years later though.
- > They probably have way more now 18 years later though.
I wouldn't neccesarily think so. Nukes are really expensive to create and maintain, but once you have "enough" getting more doesn't really provide much additional benefit.
- From the IAEA perspective, Israel is not a party to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty so they are not bound by IAEA rules (and in exchange they do not get the benefits of being part of the treaty, which are substantial)
- Israel is definitely the darling during the Cold War.
17 points by lambdabaa 1 hour ago | 10 comments