| > Proliferation is irrelevant I would not be so cavalier about that. > It was not a Candu reactor what India have used It was a heavy water reactor, called CIRUS [1], based on the NRX reactor that later evolved into the CANDU reactor [2]. > But there are easier and cheaper pathways - uranium enrichment distributed to be stealthy Iran tried that. It is not easy to keep centrifuges stealthy, you need tens of thousands of them, and they need to be organized in cascades, you can't have one here, one there. You need a few hundred here, a few hundred there, and you need conversion and deconversion facilities (of uranium oxide into/from uranium hexafluride). It is virtually impossible to keep such a program secret, the more distributed it is, the more people need to be involved, how do you keep a program secret if there are thousands of people working in those numerous facilities? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor#Early_efforts |
It's easier to keep them stealthy vs getting it from a reactor that operates under special conditions where Russia definitely helped, especially under current IAEA rulling