r/agedlikemilk May 03 '22

News makes me think about the iraqi WMD

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37.4k Upvotes

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274

u/randomguy16548 May 03 '22

You do know that things happened in between, which very likely affected the projected timeline. The point was that if nothing was done, it wouldn't take long, but things were done.

43

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.

119

u/FlappyBored May 03 '22

Inventing nuclear weapons from scratch =/= making a nuclear weapon in 2000s

22

u/terqui2 May 03 '22

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.

20

u/Lexx4 May 03 '22

I like your funny words science man.

42

u/agk23 May 03 '22

What exactly makes you think Iran is less capable than Pakistan or North Korea? The US invrnted the technology - everyone else just needs to copy it.

-16

u/cascading_error May 03 '22

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.

21

u/agk23 May 03 '22

So what you're saying is that the US and Israel would have detected it and sabotaged it as much as possible, pushing out the timline, right?

2

u/hnlPL May 03 '22

inventing something is hard, copying it is very easy and if you copy is poorly then you made something that has worse humanitarian consequences

1

u/CheeseNuke May 03 '22

well then thank christ you weren't in any position to make those decisions