Ouch My Head Hurts!

Iran and the bomb (version 2.0)

I've been thinking about the possibility that Iran might acquire nuclear weapons by means other than a home grow enrichment effort. It's hard to make a guess about what the chances are. There are several possibilities, purchase spent fuel rods, purchase refined material (U-235 or plutonium) or purchase a finished warhead. Any solution would work, since Libya revealed the existence of Chinese A-bomb plans floating round the black market. Such plans make creating a bomb easier, but not easy. After all I can buy plans on how to build a car, but that doesn't mean I can get it to run. And in this case “starting the car” means detonating plastic explosives.

The first problem is finding a seller. Would you want to sell your crazy neighbor a gun? Thats quite a liability to incur. I can't see a nuclear powers letting someone else buy their way into the club. Now as a political ploy we know its already been done. China gave Pakistan the bomb, but I bet they regret it about know.

During a convention I attended last year, a lecturer talked about efforts to stop black market trade in nuclear material. (The convention was about industrial health and safety but homeland security is all the rage.) He had maps and graphs and databases (can't seem to remember what agency he was from). He also had a confession. There are so many sting operations going on in Eurasia that they keep bumping into each other. I left pretty confident that criminal sale of such material was really unlikely.

But lets assume that you acquired a warhead. If it was a soviet era nuke then its been lying around for a couple of decades. If you parked your car twenty years ago would you expect it to work today? At the very least the battery would be dead. I know that if I was designing a nuclear weapon I would use a special proprietary battery. One with characteristics not easily duplicated. I would then design the electronics to disable the device if any other battery was used. For that matter if a criminal sold you a bomb how do you test if the arming codes are correct? Also what's the self life of the special version of plastic explosives used for A-bombs. If this is a soviet era nuke (an empire never know for quality) its been bounced from country to country in all sort of conditions for a long time. Are you going to risk war with the USA on a device of questionable quality and reliability?

This post is getting kind of long, but there are a whole lot of other details to think about. Of course I'm a scientist and pragmatist. I get paid to mind the details and make sure things work, while the Iranian president is completely nuts. On the other hand every power mad psycho on the planet wants the bomb but the nuclear club remains rather exclusive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_nuclear_weapons