What is the main technical bottleneck preventing a middle income country going nuclear? Is it still centrifuge access? Do you think this remains sufficient friction to prevent further proliferation with how Cool Zone things are getting?
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As an avowedly anti-nuclear Australian i could come up with some very compelling arguments for why we should go nuclear given that our chief security ally is insane.
It is generally assumed that getting material is the biggest bottleneck -- people have started talking about novel pathways like laser enrichment but most nonpro/counterpro is still about controlling material -- but I think there's a more fundamental Q and that is "how much bomb you need, how fast."
There's a paradox in proliferation, that the countries w/the most dire security threats seem the most likely to get nukes, except those threats also often make the act of pursuing a bomb very risky. And if you're threatened by a great power, you need to get a LOT of bomb to have confidence.
(I actually have something coming out soon on @sodrock.bsky.social's substack soon on this issue and Taiwan.) So if you're Japan and you suddenly find yourself abandoned to face China, you have to consider how fast you can get a big deterrent - not just your access to U/Pu etc.
To get deep into the technical aspects of getting material -- again, there are a lot of ways to skin the cat, centrifuges are just one part of the puzzle. You can try to hide diversions from reactors (this is hard and the IAEA will slap you), or you can go all out and build reactors just to make Pu.
(This ofc has huge costs and would be ill advised unless global material safeguards just die entirely). People have hypothesized about novel/poorly safeguarded fissiles as well. Maybe you build funny neutron beams to breed fissiles. Longer term, fusion reactors create risks here too theoretically.
Personally I am partial to using another bomb as your fissile making method it has a nice stupidity to the funniness (and it's Von Neumen approved), although neutron beams are suitably silly but I have thoughts on controlling that as a proliferation method.
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