[flacebo]

When the company I work for was buying a brand new swiss grinding machine (which enables the manufacturing of some extremely precise parts), I had to fill and sign a very strange statement about:

- the exact kind of goods that we will use the machine for

- certify that we will not use it in any nuclear explosive activity, or unsafeguarded nuclear fuel-cycle activity, or the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons

- that we won't transfer the manufactured goods or the machine outside of specific countries without the consent of some kind of swiss economic affairs office.

I got the same kind of vibes.

[techdragon]

It will be the centrifuges, and the extra words are to help obscure the intended target of the promise in an effort to continue the wide scale obfuscation of nuclear technology as part of the whole “born secret” international non-proliferation effort thing.

The issue with nuclear weapons isn’t the weapon it’s the enrichment. The isotopic separation via centrifugal forces is the most efficient and technically challenging method of enrichment, and the hardware required involves extremely high RPMs and requires running them non stop round the clock in banks of hundreds of connected together so that the tiny fraction of a percentage each individual centrifuge can enrich the isotopes eventually ends up adding up to a significant enough to be useful for nuclear stuff.

As you can imagine building a 50 thousand RPM centrifuge to run 24/7 is quite challenging and involves a lot of high precision parts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_centrifuge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippe-type_centrifuge

[tommiegannert]

Now I'm very curious what makes a precision grinding machine particularly useful for nuclear applications.

[bcbrown]

When you're using shaped charges to turn a large metal sphere into a small metal sphere, just about everything needs a high degree of precision.

[Outright0133]

Total layman guess: shaped nuclear charges?

No idea if that's even possible.