Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lazide 4 days ago
The difficulty with creating nuclear weapons has been 99% in refining and processing the fuel, not the structure of them, for a very long time.
1 comments

True for fission bombs. Less true for fusion bombs. The principal makeup and manufacturing of fusion device parts like tampers are still unknown to the public. Having a supply of HEU does not tell you how to assemble a functional triple stage device or how to utilize tritium, an isotope that measurably decreases in purity by the day.
You need a fission bomb to ignite a fusion bomb btw.