How was the USA/Russia able to build nuclear weapons in the 1940s, but countries today aren’t able to just as easily?
In: Technology
Weapons-grade uranium isn’t cheap or easy to produce, you need a vast array of equipment and a large amount of specific types of uranium to process.
It’s costly, labor intensive, and serves no civilian purpose. For that reason, most nations that aren’t military superpowers aren’t interested.
The few that are are effectively rogue states, autocratic nations that want nuclear capability to back up their regional harassment and deter invasion.
It’s hard for them to do it because they have very few allies willing and able to suply the hardware and expertise, and a great many enemies interested in stopping the production.
The US and Russia didn’t have these limiting factors in the 1940s and 50s, they could produce and test nuclear weapons freely with support from their global allies.
It takes a lot of time and money to build nuclear weapons most countries have other priorities with their money and various treaties stop people from developing them. In addition all that development is difficult to hide so someone might try to stop you while you are in the process of developing them.
The Haves preventing The Have Nots from building a nuclear arsenal. It’s more about politics than technology.
Because we all realized that everyone having nukes is more dangerous than a few superpowers having nukes. There is now a treaty that basically says “if you have nukes, you have nukes, but if you don’t, you don’t seek them out.” And then the members of this treaty make sure that the materials needed to make a nuclear weapon don’t become available, and if someone pursues nuclear arms, they will be dealt with economically.
It was never easy.
The Manhattan Project cost over $2B in the 40s. That’s $25B in current dollars.
That’s more than a rich country like Canada spends on it’s entire military.
The short answer: it’s not. That they *can’t*, it’s that the powers that already have such weapons won’t allow them to do so, and act quickly to isolate and disable state actors that aren’t close allies who attempt.to implement a weapons programs. The process is well understood, but still has very specific, difficult steps if it’s going to be achieved.
There are a bunch of reasons to do this. For one, it’s fucking *dangerous* for more actors to have access to a trigger that basically deletes humanity l. For another, it severely restricts the military options of the state actors who DO have the weapons already.
Which is what makes the North Korea situation fucking amazing. They were able to develop a delivery system at the cost of a couple photo ops.
There are international treaties and agreements in place that intentionally make it difficult. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, nuclear-weapons-free zones, various export control regimes, and attentive monitoring by intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency are all in place to make it so that if someone does try to develop nuclear weapons, they will be noticed, and then there are various kinds of ways (e.g. economic sanctions, political threats, actual acts of war) to punish them.
Additionally, most countries do not _want_ to develop the weapons: they don’t see a need. This is because they are either feel entirely non-threatened by them (e.g., they and their rivals are under a treaty that prohibits them), or they are under the “nuclear umbrella” of another nuclear state.
This system is not perfect, to be sure. Since it was put into place, Israel, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and North Korea each developed nuclear weapons. But it does seem to have slowed nuclear acquisition — there are only 9 nuclear states, not 20. The number of states that _could_ have nuclear weapons very quickly if they decided to is much larger than the number that have them.
It is not about lack of technical ability — it is much easier for a nation, technically, to build nuclear weapons today than it was in the 1940s, when there were many more “unknowns” and new things to learn.
The hitch of all of the above is that political circumstances can change. If Japan or South Korea suddenly felt like they was no longer protected by the US “nuclear umbrella” against China or North Korea, would they seek their own programs? There would be costs and consequences (sanctions, etc.), but it’s possible. Most of the trick to keeping nations from “going nuclear” has been in trying to make sure there were more advantages to them _not_ doing it than them doing it. Again, it hasn’t been perfect, but it works.
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