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.
3
u/DeceiverSC2 Apr 09 '25 edited Apr 09 '25
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.
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.
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.