Making a nuclear bomb is not a company within everyone’s reach, not so much for technical reasons but due to the difficulty in enriching the fissile material.
Fortunately, building an atomic newspaper is not a company accessible to anyone. First of all, physical materials are needed, such as uranium-235 or plutonium-239. In nature, uranium is 99.27% Uranium-238, useless for weapons, and only 0.72% is Uranium-235, the isotope capable of supporting an explosive chain reaction.
Too expensive processes. To separate them, the most used method (as in Iran) is that of the gas centrifuges: the uranium transformed into gas rotates up to 70,000 rpm per minute, pushing the isotope 238 (heavier) outwards and leaving 235 in the center. To obtain useful quantities, the process must be repeated thousands of times. For the Plutonium-239, however, a reprocessing system is needed, even more complex and expensive.
Who can build them? But are it only the states that can build a bomb? In 2013, the Pentagon commissioned a study to evaluate whether a billionaire or a private company could do it. The result? With about $ 1 billion and 5 years, the construction is technically possible through a network of legitimate companies distributed in the world by circumventing the controls.
Centrifuges. The obstacle is not the project, but the access and enrichment of the fissile material, even if the gas centrifuges would be available today. The study underlined the risk that non -state actors can aspire to nuclear technologies.
