[AndyL]

Thanks for the informative replies. Political considerations aside for the moment, from a technical point of view, all types of nuclear weapons require fissile material either as the main charge or as a trigger for fusion fuel. Without it they cannot work. At present, and I am no expert here, there are only two ways to get it.
One is to enrich natural uranium to extract the fissile isotope – a hugely expensive, technically daunting and time consuming task. This method has an advantage though, and that is you can disguise your true intentions by saying you are only making fuel for power reactors, as perhaps Iran may be doing. The technology is the same to attain either end.
The other method is to configure a fission reactor to breed fissile material either in the fuel itself or in a blanket of fertile isotopes around the reactor core. This method is also hugely expensive but has been the main stay of US weapons programs because it is less so than the first. It is also technically challenging, but it is more difficult to disguise your intentions – as a fission reactor configured for breeding maximum fissile material is different in design from one that might be chosen for power production only.
The advent of Focus Fusion using pB11 for power production would, I totally agree, render all other forms of power production obsolete, be they fission or oil. As you say, there would be no reason to pursue fission technology any longer. But the production of fissile material just got possible from a smaller, much cheaper reactor.
To blanket such a device, as far as I know, you would need to get hold of some U238 – depleted uranium – of which there are thousands of tons in inventories around the world. It is used in some applications today, anything from ballast in airframes to armour peircing rounds. I wonder how accessible this stuff really is? Deuterium is not regulated at all.
When I say “possible” I certainly don’t mean “easier”!
I do appreciate the proliferation risk would be eliminated or greatly mitigated by the sheer technical difficulty, and the other highly complex stages necessary to produce a weapon.

…and for obvious reasons I am very grateful for that knowledge.

[Author]

Posts