How were 2 countries able to discover and build nuclear weapons from scratch, simultaneously during the 1940s but most countries today can’t build them without decades of effort?
In: Physics
Only one country built it from “scratch”. The second (USSR) largely relied on information obtained from spies within the Manhattan project to create their bomb.
The hardest part about building an atomic bomb isn’t actually building the bomb
It’s getting your hands on the enriched uranium that you need to make the core.
The tools for enriching uranium are carefully tracked and it takes a lot of large centrifuges to go from yellow cake uranium to enriched weapons grade uranium.
In the 1960s the US government did a study (Nth country study) and had 3 physics PhDs design some nuclear weapons. They had no prior nuclear physics or weapons experience yet all three came up with what was agreed would be working designs.
The next tricky stage would be making it small enough to deliver on a missile because dropping it out the back of a fat bomber doesn’t really give you first or second strike capability these days
TLDR: Effectively un-limited funding
During WW2 both the Allies and the Axis powers invested a tremendous amount of time and money to develop new technologies to help in the war effort. Some worked and changed the world, others were a colossal waste of time. But the point was the governments were willing to entertain virtually any brilliant idea worth pursuing and threw tons money and resources at the problem.
We went from using semi-auto rifles, cloth winged bi-planes, and horse drawn carts to having Assault Rifles, Jetplanes, computers, and nuclear weapons in a span of about a decade.
The amount of money spent during WW2 was just outrageous and the technologies developed during it shaped the rest of the 20th century.
EDIT: It’s also worth noting that they skipped a lot of safety precautions for the sake of expediency. Which in the case of the Axis powers also included human experimentation in the concentration camps.
The US threw an assload of money and resources at the problem. The Manhattan Project budget was over $20 billion (2019 dollars) and employed over 100k people. The US also had the advantage of not having to worry about other countries boycotting or embargoing them for building the bomb. Countries these days can face severe trade sanctions if they get caught building a bomb. The major nuclear superpowers are also the ones happening to sit on the large uranium reserves, so if you want to build a nuke, you need a fuel source and the big boys just aren’t going to hand over a ton of ore for you to play with.
Building nukes is not actually all that technically difficult when you know the basics of how it is done.
Almost any developed country could build their own nuke if they wanted too. The problem is that it would hard to do so without tipping anyone of and the countries who already have nukes don’t want anyone else to join the club and that the people in many countries might not support such an endeavour.
If you look at for example Japan and Germany, there is little doubt that they could have a working nuke in relatively short time based on the technical challenge alone. However there would be huge resistance to the idea from both the people in those countries as well as the rest of the world if they tried.
Building the sort of infrastructure that gets you the raw materials to make a bomb with is hard to hide and for the most part dependent on imports.
Considering their limited usefulness for anything other than acting as a threat or starting a nuclear war they simply aren’t worth the trouble form most countries at this point.
You can be sure however that if one of the major current nuclear powers started actually using nukes on anyone. The number of nuclear powers would shoot up within very short order after that.
I could build you a gun type weapon (little boy) in my garage. The hard part would be, and always has been getting enough highly enriched uranium and shaping it correctly. Plutonium weapons are much harder to make, but have a much higher destructive ratio, but Plutonium is even harder to make than enriched uranium. So besides getting your hands on the actual fiscion material, there’s the nuclear weapons non proliferation treaty, in which the world sanctions you if you do build a bomb.
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