There were some smart guys talking about nuclear reactors & nuclear weapons in Batko's server last night. I'm actually having a hard time finding any laws explicitly prohibiting civilians from experimenting with nuclear weapons too. In the USA it seems like it's not illegal for individuals to refine or posses radioactive elements; the bigger concerns are with selling it without a license, bringing it out of your home country, or actually using a nuclear weapon …. other countries may be more nuclear friendly
It seems to me that a nuclear weapon would be much easier to construct than a nuclear reactor – and a lot of hobbyists have been able to build those. I've built a lot of conventional explosives. Anyone with more than 2 brain cells can. You could design your own bombs that would stump the bomb squad after spending a couple hours learning the basics and doing a few little tests.
The biggest challenge with constructing nuclear weapons is the assumption that the bomb is being dropped from a plane or the payload is contained in an artillery shell. But if someone makes a nuclear weapon and is willing to "take one for the team" the design ought to be much simpler. (Detonation based on a timer may also be feasible)
Questions – - how hard would it be to design an open-source nuclear weapon? - how much would it cost to produce a nuclear weapon? - has anyone researched this topic much academically? - does anyone have professional experience with nuclear technology?
Gun-type fission weapons seem the most pragmatic. Uranium is fairly cheap. To copy some info from Wikipedia –
If you have any luck, please erase Pissrael from the planet, thanks bby
Christopher Myers
Hello, COINTELPRO. Go try to recruit dumb petty bourgeois teens for your nuclear terrorism project elsewhere
Jaxson Long
SHUT UP LIBERAL
Mason Sanders
You do realize that you can’t just buy weapons grade uranium, right? You’d have to either make a reactor to enrich your Uranium, which will be like 99% useless 238 and which you will have to buy in obscene quantities, or you can waste even more money on gaseous diffusion.
looks like 90000 rpm centrifuge can be obtained for under $2000 or probably stolen even easier.
Sebastian Sanders
So if the biggest stumbling block is finding out how to enrich uranium / plutonium at scale – we ought to focus our efforts there, imagine the good we could do for the world – and a large amount of uranium isn't really necessary, even a very small payload would be very newsworthy
Nicholas Bailey
You need obscene amounts of uranium to even get enough to sustain a fissile reaction. Fissile uranium is like 0.01% of all uranium isotopes.
Alexander Cruz
the paper ultracentrifuge of Manu Prakash achieves 125k RPM. A lab ultracentrifuge tends to cost in the $5k - $30k range. To enrich uranium at scale we would need several thousand ultracentrifuges. we may be better off designing our own ultracentrifuges to reduce costs
Iran was fucked HARD when they got stuxnet'ted
Juan Allen
steps –
1. acquire radioactive ore 2. refine materials 3. store materials 4. design a method to trigger fission
1 and 3 are the easy parts
Cooper Kelly
fyi i recall that people have been charged in the USA for sharing / providing info on how to construct explosive devices. this was probably criminalized during the Bush years, but i don't know.
you should probably not participate in this thread in you live in the USA or EU countries.
tfw i live in a 3rd world country and only have to worry about being murdered while riding the bus but not Patriot Act
If you actually believe your government will allow you to 'experiment with nuclear weapons' I don't know what to tell you mate. Even if you live in Somalia some other government will stop you.
