[comrade_ogilvy]

The other thing about plutonium people fail to recognize is that practical uranium civilian power reactors are pretty lousy at producing plutonium. The proliferation risk is non-zero, but processing spent fuel is a pretty nasty business and the amount of plutonium there is so small as to be a big expense for the small yield.

The problem with plutonium is a properly designed military reactor can take the precious U235 you might build only one half a bomb with, and generate enough plutonium to create 2 or 3 implosion devices.

That is a big reason the neighbors to Iran and NK are not panicking. NK might have a bomb or two. Iran might eventually build a bomb or two. In both cases, their expertise is limited to uranium (so far), so the number of bombs they are likely to ever own within my lifetime is very few -- their stockpiles of uranium too modest to create a larger weapons stockpile. To actually use a bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to deter the overwhelming payback. Both NK and Iran are a million miles away from getting there; they need both much more uranium and plutonium expertise to even start an attempt.

If they believed their safety were at stake, South Korea or Japan would build 50 bombs -- they are skilled at the requisite technologies. Likewise Saudi Arabia would write a check $100 billion and acquire a nuclear stockpile of their own -- their defense expenditures are so astronomically high that a modest cut to their conventional forces over a decade would foot the bill.

[_b8r0]

There are several problems when it comes to gulf states for your anecdote.

The problem isn't a stable country like Saudi having the bomb, the problem is triggering an arms race. If Iran gets the bomb then what does that mean for Lebanon? If Iran gets the bomb what does that mean for Hezbollah? If Iran gets the bomb what does that mean for Syria?

If Iraq had the bomb in the 80s what would that have meant for the Iran/Iraq war, or the first Gulf war? Saddam Hussein may have felt that nuking Kuwait as part of a scorched earth policy would've been valid. After all, he used chemical weapons against Iran (and his own people).

I can't speak for asia but in the middle east nuclear bombs change the balance of power substantially.

[speeder]

North Korea seemly can use both Plutonium and Uranium (or something else entirely even).

South Korea kinda does not care, because they know North Korea wants the entire Korea, not half-korea and half burned slab of ground.

North Korea in the past had enough non-nuclear firepower to flatten South Korea many times over, seemly they STILL have that firepower AND nukes, yet South Korea knows they won't use it...

Japan on the other hand, IS kinda paranoic, in the last elections a new party was formed, with a militaristic and nationalistic tone (including visiting WWII shrines and reacalling WWII as the good times), and they got expressive votes, also the current prime minister proposed heavily remilitarize Japan (to irritation of China, and both Koreas), including scratch the current constitution, and use a new one that follow confucionism (instead of illuminism).

[tsotha]

>North Korea in the past had enough non-nuclear firepower to flatten South Korea many times over, seemly they STILL have that firepower AND nukes, yet South Korea knows they won't use it...

No. They have nukes because they have no chance whatsoever against the South. The North Korean army is bigger, but its equipment is antiquated, and it has no gas or live ammunition for training. The "soldiers" spend most of their time farming or working in factories. They don't have enough food to fight a war.

The South Korean military budget is 20x that of the North.

[sultezdukes]

South Korea kinda does not care, because they know North Korea wants the entire Korea, not half-korea and half burned slab of ground.

They might say that to their population, like they say that Kim Jung "Be Illing" shot a hole in one every time, but they don't really want the entire Korea, because they know they can never have the entire Korea.

[rdtsc]

Let's consider a scary scenario. Someone defects and shares with them all the knowledge, the blueprints, all the data related to handling and processing plutonium. How much closer would they be then to be considered dangerous. In other words is it just a matter of having information, or a matter of resources and money?

[djcapelis]

Resources and money for the most part. Also certain parts are simply hard to get ahold of, since they're export controlled, hard to produce and carefully watched. Knowledge alone is slowly becoming less and less of a barrier as time goes on and hasn't been so much of a serious mechanism to hold back a determined group with enough resources from doing some types of programs for awhile now.

It isn't that there aren't still dangerous secrets in the nuclear realm, but it's that the parts that are secret are more about how to make a really "good" bomb, or produce materially really efficiently. But the reality is that a group that doesn't really care about making good bombs or being particularly efficient isn't going to need as much secret knowledge as most people think.

To sum up, it really depends on what you mean by dangerous. They have nuclear weapons. That's pretty dangerous. But they don't have a large stockpile of well designed weapons, so no one is taking them too seriously and they're not what most people would consider a "nuclear power" because if they even tried to play with someone who was, they'd be so quickly outmatched they're extremely unlikely to do anything with them right now.

At least. So long as we live in an environment where if a nuclear bomb goes off, we're likely to know where it came from. The moment proliferation moves past that point is the moment we begin to have some real sticky issues and we are likely to have a problem.

In my mind, that's the scary scenario and it's why the world does a lot of work to limit the number of different parties that stores these types of weapons and has access to this type of technology.

[threeseed]

North Korea will never use nukes against South Korea. They want a reunified Korea under Kim Jong Un. And the best way to do this without killing innocent people is to do what they've attempt countless times before.

Dig a tunnel under the DMZ and send people in to capture/assassinate the key people within the government.

[sultezdukes]

North Korea will never use nukes against South Korea. They want a reunified Korea under Kim Jong Un. And the best way to do this without killing innocent people is to do what they've attempt countless times before. Dig a tunnel under the DMZ and send people in to capture/assassinate the key people within the government.

Wow, you really believe that is the best way? Or is that the best way in the demented minds of the N. Korean leadership?

[pekk]

> To actually use a bomb is so reckless that you need a couple dozen bombs in your back pocket to deter the overwhelming payback.

Assuming that there is a clear return address on any use of the weapon. How much time do you have to determine where to send the answering salvo? This argument made some kind of sense during the cold war, but it's dangerously naive if nearly everyone has a bomb and a long-range launch capability.

[caf]

The first two devices that North Korea has tested are thought to have been Plutonium-based (the third is inconclusive). North Korea is known to have produced and reprocessed Pu at its Yongbyon complex.

[VladRussian2]

as history and physics show there is no point in testing uranium bombs.

[arethuza]

Although the Little Boy design wasn't tested before use as it was a very conservative design, there have been quite a few tests of uranium based bombs - both implosion and gun type designs.

[_delirium]

Partly because it was a conservative design, and partly because there just wasn't enough U-235 to build an extra bomb for testing. None of the U.S.'s three completely separate experimental enrichment processes were working that well, so they resorted to running them in series to get a result that was enriched enough to be used, which resulted in relatively low throughput.

[caf]

The scientists and engineers ended up confident enough in the implosion design that Oppenheimer recommended to Groves that Little Boy be dismantled and the U-235 used to build two or three implosion bombs instead.