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Supposedly the laser enrichment process is smaller and cheaper, though it's also kept secret. You still need thousands of kilograms of natural metallic uranium, which is a rare heavy metal with few commercial uses and one really salient illegal one, or thousands of tons of uranium ore, which, see previous. It's hard to buy this stuff secretly, because not many people have it, and people who do have it have a big, salient, vested interests in not selling it to people who want to make nukes! It's not like selling drones to Saudi Arabia and saying "oh well guess it'll suck to be a Houthi". You might get nuked! Nation-states can pull this off, since they have both land and state security apparatuses. Empirically, private groups or terrorist cells haven't been able to do it. The rumors I've read and the impression I've received is that AQA spent decades trying, lost a lot of lieutenants and trucks full of cash to CIA honeypots, and eventually gave up. Too hard, too expensive, too many dead ends and entrapment schemes. |