How close was Libya to getting Nukes

During the Qadaffi regime era, the government repeatedly attempted to acquire nuclear weapons. Eventually they agreed to terminate their nuclear program just after the invasion of Iraq, but I ask, just how close were they to obtaining nuclear weapons?
 
Oh hell. Fifty years? Five hundred years? It's not a meaningful question.

All of Libya's purchased nuke accessories were all still sitting in crates, unopened, with their original North Korean and Pakistani packing materials, including the stuff that was stored upside down, the fragile stuff that had been repeatedly dropped, the stuff that had been damaged by sand, mold, improper storage, leaks, that had been purloined and sold for scrap, misplaced, lost, abandoned. In short, it was a giant pile of second rate junk that maybe, some country that really had a sophisticated infrastructure and the pretensions to an industrial base might have turned into the foundations of a nuclear weapon in a few decades.

Was Libya that country? Let me put it this way. They needed to import their elevator repairmen.... from Italy!
 

TinyTartar

Banned
Not close at all. And after Iraq, they realized the costs of what nukes could mean for Qaddafi and his role in the international community.

Even if they had some way of assembling one, and they did not, the costs of doing so were too apparent.
 
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