Once you get the know how is it really that difficult though? I mean cousin fucking Pakistanis have nukes and they developed them 50 years ago. Picking off a few top scientists IMO is just playing whack a mole here. I think the people that think that these strikes/assassinations set them back decades are much more wrong.
Building functional large enough centrifuges underground is very hard, it takes a long time and its hard to do without the USA noticing. Building them overground is obviously futile since they're sitting ducks.
The massive bunker busters dropped by the B-2s caved in their underground centrifuges. This can't be easily rebuilt since Israel and the USA are now watching them like hawks
Remember U-235 is a trace isotope at 0.7% abundance. And it's only 3 amu away from the basic U-238 (this is only a 1% difference, you try spinning something like this down and isolating it and that difference is even smaller when you have 6 fluorines attached) which means fractionating it is a delicate task, it requires very precise technology. Its so hard that they can't obtain 90%+ purity in a single pass - it needs to be spun down, spun down again, again and again until reaching that purity and that takes a whole shitton of UF6. Plus it's a gas so you get rapid diffusional mixing while trying to siphon it off. Yikes. It would be alot easier if the fissile isotope was the heaviest so you could just take it from the bottom but it's not
This post was edited by El1te on Jun 24 2025 07:44pm