What IAEA docs say about Iran's nuclear program, before the bombs fell

brewcejener

I wonder how much more uranium this is than say israel themselves have???

bogwog

> I downloaded them all and ran exhaustive AI research queries across the full corpus. What follows is what the documents actually say. Missing an /s?

rich_sasha

The article seems to stop short of a bit of logic. I'm certainly no expert but have been reading extensively on the topic. TLDR, once you have the uranium, it is still hard to build a bomb that's light and small enough to be fired in a ballistic missile. The Hiroshima bomb (Little Boy), of gun type, is about the simplest thing you can build, and still it weighted 4 tonnes, was 3 m long and 70 cm wide ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy ). Not because Americans were stoopid, but because it takes a lot of effort to make these things small. It also was very inefficient with it's use of the fissile material - it needed 64kg of highly enriched uranium, most of which didn't react at all, and it's a fundamental limitation of this design. So if Iran really has 600kg of highly enriched uranium, that's enough for 10 of those puppies. 10 too many of course... The next step up is an implosion device, where conventional explosives compress a blob of fissile metal. That was Fat Man of Nagasaki, and was about as big/heavy as the Little Boy. But used only 4kg of fissile metal for the same bang, roughly. But to make this work is a lot of science that Iran would either need to figure out, or dunno, but from Pakistan or North Korea. And even then it's massive and heavy and doesn't fit on the tip of a ballistic missile. For comparison, modern US warheads weigh around 200-300kg while delivering 20-30x the boom of the WWII bombs. All of which is to say, just having the uranium is clearly necessary, but far from sufficient from having a weapon you can use. Still... It seems taking it away by force isn't working, and if anything, confirmed to Iran that it needs it. So... Good luck to the rest of us. And in any case their main target Israel has its own nukes, I'd imagine plentiful, well researched and efficient, bringing us back to MAD, which somehow safely saw us through Cold War.