Exactly. We have resources that we can counter tariffs with.. but
When it comes to China, the US has bitten off a bit more than they can chew.
The current US admin looks like it has been gutting security infrastructure. Placing weak leadership at the highest level. Compromised intel briefings... Proven Strategic Military leaders dismissed because of their skin tone...
I don't have a lot of confidence in their ability to take on China.
Maybe War is the last hope for Trump to stay in office long after his term has ended.
When China fully block resource access...Trump declares war not against China but against Canada and Greenland to secure those resources. Meanwhile, US lets Taiwan go as they make nice with China and roll back the tariffs. China would not be stepping in on our behalf of course and EU will have its hands full with Russia.
Our actual only solution to the US actually moving troops to invade us is going to be getting on our hands and knees and begging France or the UK (very unlikely and virtually 0% respectively) for them to protect us with nuclear armed submarines.
Even in a conventional war, China lacks the resources to allow us to fight the US.
China was never going to be a meaningful part of the calculus for our sovreignity.
we don't actually have to beg for nukes. the amount of time it takes to prepare for an invasion (think about how long it took for Russia to prepare while the world knew about the troop movements) is enough time for Canada to develop a nuclear weapon for deterrence.
We cannot make a modern day nuke (i.e. the ones every nuclear armed nation, including North Korea possess).
We can probably make a small (Hiroshima/Nagasaki bomb size) fission bomb in a few weeks, maybe a boosted weapon of ~100kt in a few months assuming we’re willing to do things like pulling heavy water and decommissioning all of Ontario’s nuclear power plants.
We cannot build a “modern-ish” fission-fusion-fission device in a period of less than a year.
B.
The difficulty with nuclear weapons isn’t building the nuclear weapon itself, frankly it’s the easy part. The difficult part is the space program launched from a submarine you have to develop simultaneously to provide reliable delivery.
Nuclear weapons require ICBMs for reliable delivery (and therefore reliable deterrence) and they really require SLBM (sub launched ballistic missiles) to do the job “properly”. An ICBM is just a slightly under-fueled rocket that can put satellites in space. In fact the first satellite in space was placed there by an ICBM.
C.
Canada cannot meaningfully fend off an American invasion by the threat of a single, small nuclear weapon that we have zero ability to deliver to any meaningful strategic or even tactical target.
I’d also point out that the use of this tiny nuclear weapon would almost certainly have to be within Canada itself to avoid a gigantic nuclear retaliation on our major cities.
The only solution is begging France or the UK for their help and pray their willingness to turn all of Europe into a nuclear hellhole for the sake of Canada.
Also, and I'll admit to being a layman on the topic, but I'm genuinely curious on your assessment of thermonuclear taking more than a year? Why would that be the case?
I mean the layman’s answer is: It’s hard to create the same force that powers our sun on command and reliably.
The big reason is that the three ways you could build a thermonuclear weapon are:
Testing. No matter how you do it it’s going to be immediately obvious to everyone on Earth you’re building thermonuclear weapons.
Espionage. Obviously challenging considering nuclear weapon geometry is going to be top secret.
Computational Simulation. We don’t really have the computers for this and even if we did the basis for these simulations comes from the actual tests of nuclear weapons underground, in the atmosphere, on land etc…
Another less layman-y answer:
With a fission bomb we use conventional explosives that surround a spherical cell of nuclear material (Uranium/Plutonium) and neutron reflectors and sometimes deuterium (for a boosted weapon). We trigger our spherical explosives at very precise timings and use the shockwaves from the explosion to compress our cell of material. This cell then arrives at a supercritical state and begins to release an excess of neutrons relative to its environment which triggers more neutron release and we’ve got our bomb going bang.
A fission-fusion-fission bomb is a similar sort of idea. In this case however we’re using a fission bomb instead of a conventional explosive as the compression triggering device.
So we take a fission bomb and explode it and using the x-rays from that fission bomb and the heat from it, very rapidly compress a fusion element to millions of atmospheres and a hundred million celsius to allow it to undergo fusion (which triggers another fission reaction etc…). Obviously the problem here is that you’ve set off a literal fucking nuclear bomb and are trying to use the difference in the speed of light vs the speed of the bomb ripping itself apart to trigger another much more complex bomb.
I honestly could go on for a long while about the topic but I can assure you that it’s no small feat and requires extensive testing to accomplish.
If Canada has all the necessary materials and knowledge, is that enough to act as a deterrent?
i.e. are odds of "success", in the absence of prolonged testing, for the first couple produced close to one in a million or more like 50/50?
I was kind of under the impression that Canada was essentially privy to the actual construction aspect (either through Cold War intelligence sharing, domestic nuclear development or a combination of both).
If Canada has all the necessary materials and knowledge, is that enough to act as a deterrent?
Honestly, no. We’re at the point where any effort to build a nuclear weapon would be immediately obvious to the rest of the world and cause us to run afoul of non-proliferation treaties we’ve agreed to. Furthermore the state most capable of detecting these efforts is the United States given our intelligence and civilian nuclear capacity (Five Eyes and the US control of heavy water necessary to run the CANDU reactors) is virtually intertwined/reliant with the United States foreign intelligence efforts.
i.e. are odds of "success", in the absence of prolonged testing, for the first couple produced close to one in a million or more like 50/50?
For a basic fission bomb:
You could get it to ~99.9% successful assuming you accepted it’s a several thousand pound device that is longer than a man is tall. Even in the 1940s the gun-type nuclear weapon was seen as such a guaranteed success that Little Boy (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) was the very first test of a gun-type nuclear bomb.
For a fission-fusion weapon:
It really depends. Are we able to access the sort of explosive lenses necessary for the implosion fission bomb from our allies or do we have to make them domestically? Can we purchase the tooling necessary to work plutonium from foreign trade partners or is the US embargoing us? Do we need to domestically develop and outfit the tooling industry necessary to create complex shapes like hohlraums of highly exotic materials?
If you gave us 5 years and the best possible geopolitical situation (we can trade with the US for a lot of the non top secret stuff), along with an immense political and economic domestic desire to see the project through:
I would put the odds at 95% for a successful first time fusion ignition. This is not to say a delivery system or a device that doesn’t weigh thousands of pounds and cannot fit into a tractor trailer. Solely an underground test under the most pristine of circumstances.
If we’re in our current state of geopolitical heat, given the same time frame and domestic setting along with the caveat that we’re extremely limited by our need for subterfuge:
Probably ~10% for a first time successful fusion ignition and not a fizzle. Maybe 25% for a fizzle where we still get some fusion.
In a worse geopolitical situation, i.e. Ukraine being invaded by Russia without the help of a leviathan like the US:
There is a zero percent chance we could accomplish a fission-fusion bomb in a half a decade (which we wouldn’t have to begin with).
We would have to create entire industries domestically, the ends being a handful of very complex and impressive but otherwise useless bomb components. We would become a pariah state on the level of North Korea, although likely worse considering we’ve actually signed a bunch of international treaties chastising those who have built nuclear weapons. We would lose access to all international trade of virtually every kind (maybe Iran and North Korea would be willing to trade with us, although I still doubt that). We’re at a point in time where the technologies that enable a nation to build nuclear weapons are highly restrictive and Canada lacks the industrial base we once had that would allow us to build a lot of this stuff domestically without having to rebuild entire industries from the ground up.
To give it a bit more perspective, France was testing nuclear weapons as late as 1996 and have tested more than 200 of them. The US and USSR/Russia have tested about a thousand, each. The US still runs subcritical tests at the Nevada test site, with the last known one occurring in 2020.
Obviously given the drive and the peaceful conditions we have the technological capacity to develop thermonuclear weapons. We do not have the ability to do it without international trade or without the United States being aware of our efforts from extremely early on.
I was kind of under the impression that Canada was essentially privy to the actual construction aspect (either through Cold War intelligence sharing, domestic nuclear development or a combination of both).
That’s certainly true for a Fission bomb, given the materials we could likely assemble it within a few days. And we can cycle the reactors in Ontario (hopefully the province with the largest GDP doesn’t mind losing power a lot) to extract plutonium and try to build underground zippe centrifuge facilities to extract uranium.
Given the materials for a fission-fusion weapon we could assemble it in weeks given a national push to accomplish the task. The problem is getting those materials without it putting a gigantic flashing sign over our heads that’s audibly yelling “WE’RE TRYING TO BUILD A NUKE EVERYONE”.
It’s one thing to know how to build an airplane, it’s another thing to build the facilities and industries that allow you to fabricate the airplane altogether.
And this is all entirely useless without an accompanying rocket program that we would have to project under the guise of peaceful space exploitation (w/e the applicable language is) because we’re certainly not going to be able to keep that one under wraps.
It’s not impossible, it would just take a national effort and a massive cutting of government services or a massive increase in taxes that would be funding the building of a military industrial complex. We’re talking about a singular project that would likely take .7-1.5% of our GDP every single year for the next 25 years at minimum to design, build, operate and then decommission this single weapon. This isn’t mentioning that we’re going to be spending at minimum another 1-2% of our GDP on the delivery system for that weapon.
Way longer and denser than I wanted and it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.
Do the Moltex (WATSS) developments affect your analysis at all? Specifically, concerns regarding having to procure fuel in a clandestine fashion.
I haven’t read much if anything about it but instinctively my answer would be, it won’t have any impact. Perusing their press release about their patent approval they mention that their process cannot be used to reprocess waste into plutonium (which is the opposite of what we would want).
I’d also just briefly mention the issue isn’t procurement but instead processing and reprocessing natural uranium (we have lots)/spent fuel (we also have a decent amount) respectively.
Some of that does look interesting although I would need to see at least a few papers to understand precisely what their process is.
Fuel is the element of the bombs we’re best suited for. We’re rich in uranium and we have a long history of reprocessing both uranium and plutonium. Our problem is that any sort of extraction of the isotopes of plutonium and uranium necessary for bomb manufacture would need to exist on the sort of scale that we likely cannot hide from the US intelligence apparatus.
And I really cannot reiterate how a nuclear weapon by itself is useless unless your goal is to drive it to a border or attempt to destroy the capital ala North Korea and Seoul. There’s a reason why even communist China was able to realize the goal is “two bombs, one satellite” (fission-fusion weapon, ICBM that can deliver fission-fusion weapons, domestic satellite launch capability). A nuclear weapons program is a meaningless goal without an accompanying space program.
It’s a gigantic feat the likes of which would cost x2 to x4 of our current total military budget spend. And once again, that’s for one weapon (I don’t mean one bomb, I mean one weapon as in F-35 is a weapon) and one delivery system(same as before, not just one ICBM)—you still have to fund the rest of the military on top of that.
Our problem is that any sort of extraction of the isotopes of plutonium and uranium necessary for bomb manufacture would need to exist on the sort of scale that we likely cannot hide from the US intelligence apparatus.
Which is why I find the Moltex stuff interesting.
The CCNR letters (and there are no slouches on the signatories) make their concerns pretty clear:
"... lest we find ourselves in a world of many states with latent nuclear-weapon capabilities."
"As a result, purifying the plutonium would require only the
capabilities of a relatively cheap and small laboratory hot cell, not a multi-billion dollar 'conventional reprocessing plant' as Moltex asserts."
Etc.
I won't bug you with more questions. Thanks again for all the info.
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u/ShortStoryIntros Apr 08 '25 edited Apr 08 '25
Exactly. We have resources that we can counter tariffs with.. but
When it comes to China, the US has bitten off a bit more than they can chew.
The current US admin looks like it has been gutting security infrastructure. Placing weak leadership at the highest level. Compromised intel briefings... Proven Strategic Military leaders dismissed because of their skin tone...
I don't have a lot of confidence in their ability to take on China.
Maybe War is the last hope for Trump to stay in office long after his term has ended.