Nuclear Weapons

I have just finished reading Richard Rhodes' three excellent books on the history of nuclear weapons, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987), Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), and Twilight of the Bombs:Recent Challenges, New Dangers and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons. (2010). They detail the fascinating history of this effort, the personalities of the key players, and the inevitable political battles that were involved. One comes away amazed that so many exceedingly difficult problems were overcome in such a short time. The creators of America's nuclear weapons - both physicists and engineers - were truly brilliant.

I have also gone back and read John McFee's The Curve of Binding Energy (1994), which deals with the question of just how easy would it be for an individual, or a very few individuals, to build a home-made nuclear weapon. To cut to the chase, the answer is - very easy! All one has to know is freely available on Amazon for less than a couple of hundred dollars. All one needs in the way of equipment is freely available on e-bay, from chemical supply houses and from the local hardware store. And in fact we know this is possible because South Africa, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea have all managed to do it without help from us. It is easy to make a crude weapon, though much harder to make a weapon small enough and durable enough to fit a rocket.  The only difficult part - the only real barrier to a terrorist building a crude bomb - is obtaining enough enriched uranium, or (preferably) plutonium to make a bomb. A few kilograms of plutonium, an amount perhaps the size of a  grapefruit or less, would be enough.  And far more than that has already gone missing from nuclear inventories around the world, though how much of that is really missing and how much is sloppy record keeping is an interesting question.
                
This is an important question, because as I have argued elsewhere, if we really want to deal with the climate change issue we need to move much or most energy production to nuclear energy, which means there would be a lot of plutonium (an inevitable byproduct of running a nuclear reactor) around the nation in power plants, and it needs much better safeguards that we currently have, or that private power companies have the financial incentive to provide.