More Nuclear Proliferation

In our timeline, 9 nations have nukes, the USA, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel (probably). Also, South Africa had them, and gave them up. What if nukes had proliferated a lot more than they did? How bad can it get? How many nations can gain control of this powerful weapon? Is it likely that more than 2 will be dropped in war?
 
Israel has them, not probably but most definitly.

How many nations? Germany, surely. Japan, likely. Canada, perhaps. Brazil, why not? Iran, absolutely.

I think you can add at least 10 countries if it spreads with no brake, with no fear of the devices. Of course as soon as another explodes, for whatever reason besides testing you can bet on it the demand to get rid of them will rise and rise among the populace. Question is who will finally demand it, the populace or the other nations who want to be the only one left?
 
Saudi Arabia , pre-gulfs Iraq,Vietnam,South Korea,Italy,Switzerland and any nation that's not super small with enough time
 
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Argentina will want them, if Brazil hase them.
The Treaty of Tlatelolco would not exist ITTL.
There would be considerable pressure on Germany and Japan not to do THAT, as in, please, really don't. We mean, seriously. That would be especially badly regarded for Japan, including by a vast number of Japanese.
In particular, if this is in a Cold War context, IF West Germany does it, East Germany will want to do it as well (and vice versa), which would make the screams of horror and disgust from both the NATO and the Warsaw pact audible from Alpha Centauri.
It's hard to see why, however. Everything under the NATO and Warsaw Pact nuclear umbrellas would have little point in doing that, except for particular contexts (see for Turkey below) or as display of power ad autonomy (Britain and France IOTL). Display of power and autonomy from German quarters during the Cold War is NO, JUST NO.
People would be floating Morgenthau plans around as soon as either Germany begins suspicious enriching, I'd suppose.
In a proliferation context, Francoist Spain could be interested, though it may lack the capability/money. So could Turkey in the seventies/eighties, especially if other ME countries like Iran, Iraq or Syria are running significant and dangerous-looking nuclear programs.
Asia might be nasty. Vietnam, Indonesia, possibly Burma, both Koreas, Taiwan... at which point Australia gets nervous and decides she need her own deterrent, you know, just in case.
Add a regional nuke arms race in the Middle East, and at least attempts at it in Africa if Apartheid SA keeps both the damn things and, by some miracle, Apartheid.
Hmmm.
A worrying world.
 
Making nukes isn't hard.

In an exercise in the 60s, a few American physicists were able to design a working atomic bomb in about a year (3 man-years total of postdoc time total, though obviously a real design would take a little longer because of technical details and testing and debugging...)

The US went from almost literally nothing to Trinity in about 3 years.

The hard part is, today as also somewhat in the Manhattan Project, acquiring the nuclear material. Breeding plutonium requires a breeder reactor and then a very extensive chemical manufacturing process to purify the plutonium from the spent/bred rods (note: most breeder reactors use heavy water, which is also fairly expensive to harvest). Enriching uranium - the other option - is an incredibly expensive, time consuming process.

Note that the Iran deal primarily dealt with generating fissile material, and not anything related to an actual bomb, because bombs are basically negligibly easy to make.

Now, what kind of country can do the necessary enrichment? A lot of the question is how many devices they want. But the short answer is that any moderately large, moderately wealthy country could if they wanted. The Czech Republic probably could have during the Cold War. Slovenia probably could today. The primary forces preventing this were political - there was a lot of pressure to rely on big players for a "nuclear umbrella". Arguably the French and British nuclear programs were for nothing more than egotism, as any real nuclear engagement would have seen those nations siding with the US.

So, if you somehow prevent the bipolar world of OTL's Cold War, you could probably see dozens of nuclear powers. Probably any country that is economically developed or has a large population could do it. The main obstacle might actually end up being uranium supply, which is pretty regulated and surprisingly concentrated in developed countries (excepting, of course, a giant reserve in the Congo)

But the real obstacle is convincing countries that they need a very expensive weapon they'll likely never use. OTL it was basically used to show that you were a big boy, but that'll be less and less the case as more countries get the Bomb.
 

Delta Force

Banned
It's important to distinguish between production reactors and breeder reactors, because they are very different.

Production reactors are nuclear reactors that are used to produce isotopes for medical purposes and/or materials for various industrial and military uses. They can be anything from pile type reactors (loaded horizontally, fuel pushed out of the back into a cooling pool) like the Hanford B-Reactor and early Windscale designs, pool reactors as used in many research reactors (open from the top with the fuel in a pool of coolant) similar in design to TRIGA but larger, or even pressure tube designs (such as Magnox, UNGG, and the RBMK) that are used for production and power generation. Production reactors tend to be graphite moderated and air or gas cooled (water cooling is a bad idea I get into if anyone is interested), and heavy water moderation is a popular option as well. There aren't many large scale light water cooled/moderated designs.

Breeder reactors are designed to produce more fissile material than they consume and can use natural uranium, partially spent uranium fuel, plutonium, thorium, and even nuclear waste to produce power and uranium. They are intended for commercial uses in order to increase fuel supplies. BN-600 is the most successful breeder reactor to date. Most breeder reactors tend to be sodium cooled and all are unmoderated. There has been talk of building gas cooled breeder reactors and of course breeder reactor variations of the molten salt reactor. You could use a breeder reactor to produce uranium or plutonium for a nuclear weapon, but that's a risk that exists for any program that uses nuclear reactors and reprocessing. I suppose the issue is more that a breeder reactor requires reprocessing to work.
 
The best way to get more nuclear nations, IMHO, is to see nukes used after WW2. The US using them in Korea, India or Pakistan using them, the Israelis using them as a last ditch etc. Once you see nukes used, especially in a regional conflict, and the taboo broken, a lot of folks are going to want them as they see them as other than something that always stays in the bunker and never used. If you have one nation in an unstable region, like the Persian Gulf or South American (at times), get nukes and the others don't have an official/treaty nuclear protector...
 
I'd suggest a no US-UK MDA in 1958 could lead to the UK looking for partners for its nuke programme to spread the costs. France would be one partner for starters but other Commonwealth countries who were thinking about nukes in the 50s and 60s such as Australia could join the programme and get their own nukes and still others could become dual key partners. And if Britain was doing it then the French could also do it with her ex colonies, and al of a sudden you have 3rd and 4th and even 5th and 6th party nukes spread all over the world for no good reason.
 
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