[giardini]

I don't know what you classify as existential. But unfortunately it is drop-dead easy to make a fission bomb and even easier to make (multiple) dirty bombs. Iran has the pieces to do these things many times over. Hell, by now they could have deployed dirty bombs abroad in multiple locations and we'd never know.

The only reason the USA doesn't flatten Iran with nukes is that the USA fears Russia will view it as an "all bets are off!" action and will do the same to Ukraine et al. Which is probably true right now.

[laughing_man]

lol no. Iran hasn't yet been able to enrich uranium to the necessary purity to make a bomb. Yes, making a bomb is easy once you have the materials. Getting the materials is very difficult. If by "dirty bombs" you mean a conventional bomb with radioisotopes mixed in... well, the use of that kind of weapon would probably get Iran invaded, but since it's not a very practical weapon it wouldn't affect the strategic situation.

Nuking Iran was never in the cards. We could have done that in 1979 and any time since. Ukraine has nothing to do with it. The red lines that would provoke a nuclear response from the US are pretty well known -- the US foreign policy establishment hashed out this stuff 75 years ago. Iran could get nuked by the US if it used NBC weapons against the US or our allies. No amount of bad behavior with conventional weapons is going to do it.

People in charge of nuclear armed countries are worried about the end of the so-called "nuclear taboo" which has kept countries from using nukes for 80 years, and they're not going to break it over a third rate power like Iran unless that third rate power actually acquires nukes and makes a credible threat to use them. We didn't use them in Korea or Vietnam. We didn't use them in Afghanistan. We haven't nuked North Korea. All more serious situations than the one in which we find ourselves today.

When somebody finally does break that taboo the world will be a much, much more dangerous place for everyone and planners in places like Washington, Moscow, and Beijing know it. Once a nuclear weapon is used, especially by a country with a large arsenal, every country that could have nukes but doesn't is going to have nukes.

Here's a good video on the topic concentrating on the possible Russian use of nukes in Ukraine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxOO0hCCSk4

[giardini]

laughing_man says "Yes, making a bomb is easy once you have the materials. Getting the materials is very difficult."

Well, apparently they've had (lots of) the raw material for years. And they have training: all those Iranian science majors at universities during/after the Shah was deposed are candidates. They've had 40 years to study, play and worship. As a friend says, Pakistan got the bomb and if they can do it, anyone can!

Marie Curie purified plutonium all by herself before the turn of the century (albeit in minuscule amounts at high personal cost), so I have little confidence in your assessment.

laughing_man says "...use of that kind of weapon would probably get Iran invaded"

That's the situation they're in. Furthermore many of them are "holy warriors" for whom death is a reward. 72 virgins waitihg for each martyr - I can almost smell the testosterone from here.[Note to countermeasures people: possibly use smell to "sniff them out" of their caves and hidey-holes?? Farhad's flatulence brings him down, bwahahaahaaaaah!8-))]

laughing_man says [dirty bomb] "not a very practical weapon".

Unfortunately I believe this is just wrongheaded. When I was a kid I read Flash Gordon cartoons. There was an episode with "cobalt bombs" to wipe out a civilization permanently. One of the few times that I was freaked out as a kid. Nuclear war didn't scare me at all, but cobalt bombs and extermination - sheeeeeeit!8-(

Seems the Russians read the same comic strip and took it to heart:

https://www.wired.com/2007/09/soviet-doomsday/

and

https://www.unrevealedfiles.com/russias-dead-hand-the-doomsd...

who's to say Iranians are any different (albeit hornier - though granted it really is a lot colder in Russia than in Paradise!).

laughing_man says: "When somebody finally does break that taboo the world will be a much, much more dangerous place for everyone and planners in places like Washington, Moscow, and Beijing know it. Once a nuclear weapon is used, especially by a country with a large arsenal, every country that could have nukes but doesn't is going to have nukes.?"

No shit, Sherlock! You're waking up. "Nuclear deterrence" is dead IMO (The July/August 2026 issue of "Foreign Affairs" magazine discusses this). [I hope there's no rush, I haven't yet bought a plane ticket. Goddammit! Probably end up rowing again!8-((].

[ben_w]

> Well, apparently they've had (lots of) the raw material for years.

"raw material" != "material".

While I assume they could've purified enough of the former into the latter by this point if they wanted to, it is a much much harder thing to do than to say.

> Marie Curie purified plutonium all by herself before the turn of the century (albeit in minuscule amounts at high personal cost), so I have little confidence in your assessment.

No, what she discovered was *polonium*, not *plutonium*.

She named polonium that in support of the nationhood of Poland (which was at the time was partitioned between three countries), despite discovering it she never actually isolated it because polonium has a half life of 138 days which makes it a really really small fraction of the total material.

Polonium was first isolated in 1902 by Willy Marckwald who managed a whole 3 milligrams and even then it took another three years for people to realise what he'd isolated was the same thing Marie Curie had found. It took 15 tons of pitchblende to get those 3mg.

*Plutonium* on the other hand was first discovered in 1934. Plutonium (and uranium) is the stuff that makes fission bombs. It takes tens of kilograms of uranium or plutonium per bomb.

Purification of chemical elements (both polonium and plutonium) is much, much easier than separating the isotopes of uranium; and you need to purify ("enrich") uranium to a specific isotope to manufacture more than trivial quantities of plutonium. (And, indeed, polonium).

> Unfortunately I believe this is just wrongheaded. When I was a kid I read Flash Gordon cartoons. There was an episode with "cobalt bombs" to wipe out a civilization permanently. One of the few times that I was freaked out as a kid. Nuclear war didn't scare me at all, but cobalt bombs and extermination - sheeeeeeit!8-(

You're taking a comic book plot device as evidence?

Also, cobalt bombs != dirty bombs:

A cobalt bomb is a bomb powered by a nuclear explosion, that has enhanced fallout.

A dirty bomb is a normal, non-nuclear, explosive, that has some radioisotopes attached to it.

The former easily wipes out a city; the latter messes up a building.

[giardini]

Thanks for the history corrections and clarifications. Now I'll never forget that Mme. curie isolated polonium (another nearly-useless factoid). History is important but not as important as science. Still you're looking more and more like Frank Drebin: "Nothing to see here, folks, move along!"

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=google....

ben_w: "You're taking a comic book plot device as evidence?"

I was telling a story about my early life! Get a grip! It was a lead-in to a)the Soviet doomsday device which may have been real and may still be around and b)to my early fright at the nasty side-effects of nuclear weapons.

ben_wL "The former easily wipes out a city; the latter messes up a building."

Indeed an understatement! The Chernobyl reactor is an accidental "dirty bomb". It FUed quite a large area: people don't do much picnicking in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:

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

Spare me talking about how large the Chernobyl reactor and how heavy its fuel rods are, etc. Fissionable material and fission by-products are generally toxic: spreading it around is devastating and difficult to correct. And the Iranians have lots of that kind of crap.

[esseph]

> History is important but not as important as science.

Bullshit. Without historical data, you can't recreate experiments!

[giardini]

esseph sez "Bullshit. Without historical data, you can't recreate experiments!"

Why bother posting such nonsense?

[ben_w]

> Thanks for the history corrections and clarifications. Now I'll never forget that Mme. curie isolated polonium (another nearly-useless factoid). History is important but not as important as science. Still you're looking more and more like Frank Drebin: "Nothing to see here, folks, move along!"

Sarcasm noted, but you were mixing up something that wasn't isolated by Curie because it was too hard to do so, with something that was only found in the year she died.

> Indeed an understatement! The Chernobyl reactor is an accidental "dirty bomb". It FUed quite a large area: people don't do much picnicking in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:

If you gathered all the nasty decay products from Chernobyl and put them into convenient balls to strap to an explosive for the purpose of messing up someone else's country, you'd immediately have a problem of *the balls would cause the explosives you put them next to, to catch on fire, because of the heat output of their own radioactive decay*. Even in the spread-out form of the real life incident, robots stopped working when they got too close to large concentrations, the radiation fried circuits.

You are scared of something that is not only not plausible, it's something such that if they could do it at a scale big enough to hurt you, they'd have better things to do, e.g. hitting the US warships counter-blockading Hormuz.

> Spare me talking about how large the Chernobyl reactor and how heavy its fuel rods are, etc.

Spare you the most important point?

> Fissionable material and fission by-products are generally toxic: spreading it around is devastating and difficult to correct. And the Iranians have lots of that kind of crap.

You say "lots" like it's a point, but it isn't: "lots" is far too vague.

Chernobyl had nearly 3000 times as much uranium in it as a fission bomb, to a different enrichment level, but how much enrichment matters during a criticality incident which transmutes elements into the nasty radioisotopes that you don't want to be around is complicated for fallout calculations. Nobody, including SpaceX, has a missile that is big enough to carry that all in one go.

  At the time of the accident in the reactor of the fourth power-generating unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, the core contained 1659 fuel assemblies. Each assembly contained 114.7 kg of uranium, and therefore the reactor contained a total of 114.7 x 1659 = 190,287.3 kg of uranium. If the amount of fuel is calculated according to the uranium dioxide, i.e. in the form in which the fuel was loaded into the fuel elements, then its mass in each fuel element was 3.6 kg. A fuel assembly consists of 36 fuel elements, and therefore the reactor contained 3.6 x 36 x 1659 = 215,006.4 kg of uranium dioxide. The investigations performed in the destroyed buildings showed that the nuclear fuel after the accident is found in three main modifications: in the form of uranium dioxide tablets, in the form in which it was loaded into the reactor; in a dispersed form as dust and aerosol; and in a remelted state, in the form of a lavalike fuel-containing mass. This paper discusses the amount of nuclear fuel in the lavalike mass at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

- https://www.osti.gov/biblio/226794

In comparison, the one which levelled Hiroshima contained 64 kilograms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy

This scale difference is also (one of the reasons) why even having a nuclear reactor as a "civilian program" is suspect. Makes it relatively easy to hide a weapons program.

Much, much more effective to use the reactor to transmute yourself some plutonium, than a dirty bomb. Apart from anything else, half the plutonium won't vanish in 30 years (caesium-137) / 28.9 years (strontium-90) / 8 days (iodine-131) like the main Chernobyl fallout is doing.

[giardini]

OK, so you seem the proper nerd to ask something I've been wondering for a long, long time: the world has tons of nuclear weapons. Each consists of at least one fission component and an optional thermonuclear component. Let's concentrate on the fission part.

Q. Would it be possible to economically move the fission component into a standardized nuclear reactor that could then generate electrical power?

IOW is there a "swords to plowshares" solution to the disposal of fission weapons or, once you've made one, are you stuck with a device that can only be used to blow things up?

Reason I ask is, I see Russia et al sitting on all these weapons which cost a great deal, are no doubt costly to maintain and of little or no benefit to anyone (well, other than as a threat). [I mean, it's almost like owning a fleet of BMWs but even less useful! ] If we could build a "reactor framework" into which we could move a single warhead's fuel and that fuel could generate electrical power until sufficiently diminished to be of little/no use as a weapon, then that would IMO be a very good thing. Countries like Russia who had a closet of nukes but no money could sell the nuclear fuel off and benefit, buyers could get electrical power cheaper(?), and the world would be better off. Everybody wins.

Or is making a nuclear weapon effectively an economic one-way street (i.e., you're stuck paying for it forever?

[Epa095]

No, Ukraine is not the (sole) reason. USA has been in multiple wars since 1945, and never used the bomb again. They know the value of the nuclear tabu, and are not interested in breaking it, independently of the situation in Ukraine. They also have enough conventional weapons to level Iran with those, so they dont need to use nukes.

In addition I would hope that even in the morally bankrupt state USA is in today, murdering 92 million people would cause some political problems (but this might be naive of me).

[esseph]

> In addition I would hope that even in the morally bankrupt state USA is in today, murdering 92 million people would cause some political problems (but this might be naive of me).

It might move the needle 15%.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I don't know what you classify as existential

Doesn’t matter. This question turns entirely on what Israel’s leadership thinks. If they’re faced with an existential threat, nukes are likely on the table.

[ericmay]

> The only reason the USA doesn't flatten Iran with nukes is that the USA fears Russia will view it as an "all bets are off!" action and will do the same to Ukraine et al. Which is probably true right now.

That is not the only reason the United States doesn’t flatten Iran with nukes. It’s not even a consideration. How are you even arriving at such a conclusion?