Re:Why Hasn’t the World Been Destroyed in a Nuclear War Yet?
by andyjohnson0 on Thursday May 07, 2015 @08:00AM
(#9504417)
Nuclear weapons are hard to engineer [1]. Assembly requires a lot of expensive engineering resources and access to raw materials. By the time you've got the infrastructure together you're no longer an average terrorist, but more like a small state or maybe a corporation, and vulnerable to espionage or military disruption by other players. Terrorists are interested in using terror to achive
BUT the US government ran a study in the early sixties, called the "Nth Country Experiment" [2], that took a few recent physics PHDs and paid them to see if they could develop a design for a nuclear weapon. They surprised everyone by designing a credible implosion weapon. So it can be done. And the amount of available information and technology is better than fifty years ago.
BUT the US government ran a study in the early sixties, called the "Nth Country Experiment" [2], that took a few recent physics PHDs and paid them to see if they could develop a design for a nuclear weapon. They surprised everyone by designing a credible implosion weapon. So it can be done. And the amount of available information and technology is better than fifty years ago.
[1] http://fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/design.htm
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment