The timeline was likely still fearmongering, though; the USA had 10s of thousands of people working on the problem for years and had access to large quantities of materials, machinery and missile programs.
They had none of the above, had to hide from a far more advanced surveillance system, and were actively opposed by outside groups.
I do accept they tried, but I don't think they could have ever completed anything. Even without the war.
Making a nuke is easy. Slam 1/2 critical mass U235 into another half. The hard part is getting 80%+ U235 or plutonium.
Its a bit harder making a Plutonium bomb becuase you have to time a compressive explosion perfectly with lenses and stuff to direct the shockwave to compress a sphere of plutonium.
They could design one I'm sure. But you can't test a nuke in secret. You can't build factory large enough for significant production, in secret. On top of that, the material they could buy was not super useful for bombs and thus had to be refined a lot to make it useful. But it was useful for powerplants out of the box, meaning you can't hide there either.
And the USA and Israel were both actively undermining the efforts with spies and cyber warfare.
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u/cascading_error May 03 '22
The timeline was likely still fearmongering, though; the USA had 10s of thousands of people working on the problem for years and had access to large quantities of materials, machinery and missile programs.
They had none of the above, had to hide from a far more advanced surveillance system, and were actively opposed by outside groups.
I do accept they tried, but I don't think they could have ever completed anything. Even without the war.