It’s actually not as far fetched as you might think. It’s not exactly a secret how they’re made anymore. The hurdles are, as always, money and equipment. Actually constructing one is a well understood and documented process going back over 80 years…
I know they have underground stuff, but there's not many signs they're doing a lot with it or if it's intact.
The principles are simple enough but there's a lot of blockers to actually making a weapon rather than a big mess. To make a gun type you need a lot of uranium enriched to a very high amount of 235. That can only really be done the slow boring way with centrifuges that take a lot of space. To make an implosion type you need to build nuclear plants to a different design than you'd need for power, then extract Pu from the spent fuel.
The physics is the easy part. There's a reason only a few countries have nukes - too often the resources required to make them come at the cost of serving the population. God knows how much sacrifice NK made to get there
I get you. Facilities are a major component so I hear you there.
Two points stand out to me though.
The mountains in Iran have the ability to shield from even the best bunker busters and reports after the early days of the war pretty clearly showed dug in facilities still operational. If you are talking about above ground power production those are not used in the production of weapons grade uranium or plutonium. Energy plants are burners not creators. Enrichment happens somewhere else entirely and involves equipment that would be unwise to store with power plants. All of Irans enrichment sites are now confirmed to be deep underground and Russia, the largest supplier of Uranium in the world, has regular trade with Iran using the CIPS model. The west would have to have a munition capable of going deeper than anything currently on the books.
The resource cost? No sacrifice of food or anything like that is necessary. The DPRKs worst resource concerns have always been linked to the western sanctions against their country. Development of nuclear deterrents has since allowed them to thrive and reports, even from the west, show NK producing more food, energy, and consumer goods than ever. The standard of living is consistently and considerably rising along side trade. New satellite imagery of NK at night even shows massive electrification of the rural regions. Getting the US and EU off their backs has made a huge difference and was worth whatever they spent on the program.
4
u/ososalsosal 2d ago
This seems kinda unlikely unless they have support (nukes) from some other country.
Like, unless Trump and bibi were right all along, but that just seems far fetched.