Basic nuclear weapons are really, really simple to build. This is especially true of uranium bombs. Is there any case of a weapon being deployed operationally without ever being test-fired, other than dropping Little Boy over Nagasaki? That's how simple uranium bombs are.
Gas centrifuges (when not being sabotaged) make uranium enrichment pretty simple, and they have been around since the '80's as a fairly well-understood technology. There were warnings back then that they would lead to a wave of proliferation, which to an extent they have.
So the only plausible way Iran could have been "working on" nuclear weapons for 30 years without producing one is if they aren't working very damned hard. Their economy is about half the size (GDP per capita) than the US economy was in the early '40's but much more concentrated in terms of the state's ability to control it.
So it isn't lack of resources that is holding things up. It is most likely lack of political will: Iran would like to be seen to be working on a Bomb, but for whatever reason isn't actually doing much toward building one. If they were, they would have one by now.
A team of competent high school students with a billion dollar budget could manage it in a year.
[Edit: this is not a defense of the theocratic monsters that run Iran, I just don't think they are as big a nuclear threat as is commonly assumed.]
Building and testing a bomb accomplishes nothing positive for Iran's agenda: representing the threat that they could produce a bomb is invaluable to Iran's agenda. It is clearly for that reason the country is willing to absorb "crippling" sanctions in order to continue enrichment. Otherwise, why give up so much treasure?
I know there are few undertakings as trivial as nuclear physics. It's not even interesting enough to have to test it. I would deploy straight to production without a second thought - wouldn't you?
They need to fire their CTO like yesterday - it's a wonder they're they're still in business. I have half a mind to show them how to do it in Angular over the weekend. :)
It's only nuclear physics. This stuff was solved 70 years ago.
> They need to fire their CTO like yesterday - it's a wonder they're they're still in business. I have half a mind to show them how to do it in Angular over the weekend. :)
Well note that most of the startups here are not doing any difficult or novel tech; it's the same old boring web + mobile stuff that every other high-schooler with a JavaScript book could do. The "hard things" startups face are mostly about staying in business (and only long enough to have "an exit" and kiss the surprised users goodbye), which is a class of problems you don't have when you're building a first nuclear bomb for the government.
http://www.dw.de/irans-supreme-leader-using-nuclear-weapons-...
'Mr Bush expresses anger that US intelligence agencies played a role in removing the option of military action against Iran over its nuclear programme.
He describes the "eye-popping declaration" in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) judging with "high confidence" that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme.'
Wait. Am I reading this correctly? Does it say that Mr Bush is angry that he couldn't go to war?
The rest of the world should be demanding the US get rid of its arsenal as the US can't be 'trusted' with them. As they have proven they are willing to use them.
Maybe not todays president or the next but are the checks and balances strong enough to prevent a future president from dropping another bomb?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Implosion...
I don't think Little Boy's design was tested prior to being dropped on Hiroshima.
As for why it has taken them so long, there are many reasons. One is that development of nuclear weapons was not a priority for them for a long time. The other is that centrifuge technology is actually very, very difficult. It took until that technology was disseminated (by way of the AQ Khan network in the '90s) for Iran to have a reasonable shot at producing nuclear weapons. And it took longer for them to perfect the technology and then begin increasing the capacity.
More so, Iran has been tiptoeing through the geopolitical minefield of acquiring nuclear weapons very, very carefully. If they had wanted they could have tested a nuclear weapon perhaps years ago, but there would be so many negative consequences of that it would be questionably worth it. Instead they've deftly manipulated public perception and international politics to their favor. Today they have a greater capacity to produce nuclear weapons than the US did in 1945, and yet they are not considered a nuclear power, and they do not face the serious repercussions that, say, North Korea or even Libya have faced from their nuclear program. Part of this comes down to the fact that the public at large and high level politicians are rather ignorant of scientific and technological issues, let alone advanced topics like nuclear weapons manufacture, so it is far easier for them to believe the lie that Iran is nowhere near producing nuclear weapons.
But make no mistake, as I mentioned, Iran is a nuclear capable state. They could field a weapon in a matter of at most months, perhaps as little as days. They've been allowed to stockpile 5% and 20% enriched Uranium and to maintain a vast infrastructure of Uranium enrichment centrifuge cascades. 5% and 20% may seem like a very, very far distance from the 80-95% enrichment needed for making bombs, but that is due to ignorance of the process. It takes 75% of the isotopic separative work to enrich natural Uranium to 5% as it does to reach weapon's grade HEU, and 95% of the work to get to 20% enrichment. Which means that starting with a stockpile of 20% enriched Uranium one can produce HEU with only 1/20th the amount of work as it would take using natural Uranium, and from 5% only 1/4 of the work.
Given Iran's known enrichment facilities they could send their known stockpiles through them and have bomb grade material in a very short amount of time. Moreover, there is no guarantee that they do not have secret facilities as well. Such facilities are shockingly easy to hide, the world discovered North Korea's facilities only when the state itself revealed them.
Every other component for making a nuclear bomb is comparatively trivial to engineer. Iran could quite easily be testing such components without any outside knowledge they are doing so, such activities are enormously easy to hide because at most they amount to the explosion of a small amount of high explosives, which can be done underground, for example. It would be easy for them to have already practiced making the fissile cores of bomb designs using natural Uranium metal. All it would take is Iran's leaders to say "go for it" and then not long after they would have run their Uranium stockpiles through their enrichment facilities, then formed and installed their cores and have their weapons waiting for use.
Iran has been very sophisticated in their pursuit of nuclear weapons, since they now have the ability to field them should the situation arise and yet are facing almost none of the consequences of having a weapons program.
Worse than that, apparently he's not expected or, really, allowed, to apply basic logic and arithmetic in his research without being subject to ridicule: "It was a typical Coster-Mullen moment: he treats the world’s most destructive invention as an ordinary clocklike mechanism, made of simple parts that must fit together according to readily discernible laws."
Seriously, if there's one thing you can say about the Manhattan project, it is that it was an entirely positivistic, scientific activity. The lack of moral or ethical qualms that might be lamented in retrospect doesn't change the nature of the weapon. The mechanical aspects of the bomb are just that, mechanical.
Kenneth Goldsmith would probably excuse the style of this article as twee, but it feels worse than that. It is corrosively anti-geek.
An article that simply repeated the facts about what Coster-Mullen had discovered about the bomb would simply be his book. Everybody has their quirks, and an accurate representation of the person (because indeed, the article is about John Coster-Mullen, not the atomic bomb) should include more than a bare listing of facts about their life. Of course it seems a bit ridiculous, but what hobby on such close inspection doesn't? I think reading it as a criticism is very far removed from the author's intention.
I do agree however that the title of the article (on HN) should probably simply be "Atomic John," it's okay for an article title to be a little bit mysterious, and using a subtitle creates a bit of the wrong impression in this case. (I am not sure about what the actual guideline is however)
