My understanding is that it isn’t enough to know how to build a nuclear weapon, or even to have the materials. Uranium and plutonium will kill you very quickly in a machine shop setting if you don’t also have the right protective equipment and a whole lot of practical experience.
Don’t underestimate how hard it would be to assemble an actual working bomb.
It depends on your goal. If you want to build the bomb and survive in the long run, it will be difficult. If you just want to make a big bang with no other requirements, unfortunately it's pretty easy to do.
We could be happy about the two things that it is not that easy to get enough plutonium in the required purity and that most people love their lives.
Is it possible that most terrorist groups understand the cost/benefit trade off? In other words, if you have folks capable of designing and/or assembling a nuclear device, those aren’t people you just throw away.
I understand that terrorists don’t value lives highly, but you don’t see experienced bombmakers actually conducting suicide attacks for a reason. They’re valuable alive.
You need to run your machine shop like a clean room. Laminar airflow, high grade air filters, glove boxes, etc. Anyone who has ever even walked through a machine shop will know how challenging that would be. You probably aren’t going to do it in your garage.
For uranium there’s an actual public US government report.
> that most countries that want to become nuclear powers aren't able to do it
How do you know this?
The thing is that most countries don’t want to become nuclear powers because there is a carefully setup and maintained set of incentives against it. This involves both carrots (you get good things if you don’t want nukes) and sticks (bad things happen to you if you do want nukes).
This set of incentives failed a few times and that is how we got nuclear proliferation. Almost everyone who wanted nukes enough despite this set of incentives were able to do it.
I can't know for sure of course. But it seems reasonable to me to think that at least most of the dictators would want to have nukes to keep their hold on power. And there are many.
The problem is that many things are correlated. The possibility that one has the capacity (in all its forms) to achieve such a project while at the same time harboring such socially hostile goals is like zero.
The calculus is not simply 95% brain drain so 5% not drain so 5% will behave in this way. There is correlation between being in each group.
I have the same optimistic belief as you, but I wonder if the world really works like that. Meta employees (who are by definition smart enough to get the job) haven't all quit after reading the studies that show that Instagram usage results in teen depression and suicides.
Or perhaps that supports your point. The smart people with fluid morality are vacuumed up by the Metas of the world, leaving none that would build a nuke for a third world dictator.
And yet there has never been a single nuclear device used or tested by non state actors. Why?
The answer is that anyone with the ability and resources has no incentive. If you are smart and driven enough to build a device you can certainly go out and get pretty good programming gig.
> there has never been a single nuclear device used or tested by non state actors. Why?
Simple. Because to enrich the required materials you need a big operation which sticks out like a sore thumb. There are people actively looking for these with the intent to distrupt them. By the time you are big and sophisticated enough to evade these efforts you are basically a state actor in anything but maybe name.
> If you are smart and driven enough to build a device you can certainly go out and get pretty good programming gig.
The job market/job opportunities for programmers is/are much worse in many other countries. Also consider that many programming jobs that exist are actually quite boring (think into the direction of implementing LoB applications in a department that is considered a cost center instead of profit center). In my experience, there exist not that many programming jobs that give satisfaction to highly smart people, and getting such a job often requires some very specific traits that are quite different from raw intelligence.
Don’t underestimate how hard it would be to assemble an actual working bomb.