Science: Crashing the N Club

From Western intelligence reports last week came warnings that Red China will soon explode a nuclear device at a test site in her desert interior. By some estimates the first Chinese blast will quiver the world's microbarographs in about six months; others give 18 months as a more likely figure. But no one doubts that Red China will crash the nuclear club (U.S., Russia, Britain, France) without much more delay. Said one U.S. physicist: "I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet." A British physicist puts it more broadly: "Everybody knows how to make bombs, even small countries."

A melancholy fact of contemporary life is that almost anyone—any industrialized or semi-industrialized nation—can build a nuclear capability, including weapons of war. The basic technology is well understood, the engineering problems have been simplified, and the cost, so staggering in the early days, has been pared to the point where a bang can be bought for $500 million. Such advanced nations as Italy, Sweden, West Germany and Japan could obviously do it. So, too, say U.S. scientists, could Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, India, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.

No Painful Pioneering. When the multibillion-dollar U.S. Manhattan Project pioneered the art during World War II, there was no such thing as nuclear technology. Starting with only a few scientific guidelines, the physicists had to create new instruments, materials, processes, even a new element: plutonium. They had to write new reference books in a new technical jargon. Their basic raw material, uranium, was a chemical curiosity. To get it in carload lots, they needed a new mining industry with a novel and tricky technology.

Today's candidates for the nuclear club need not repeat this painful pioneering; their scientists can find everything they need in their library. They can study nuclear engineering in U.S. or European universities and buy nuclear instruments, equipment and materials on the open market. No scientific brilliance, only routine competence, is necessary to turn these readily available resources into practical bomb-making technology. According to one U.S. atom expert, a task force of 20 Ph.D.s and about 300 engineers could make something go boom.

No Mystery. A considerable industrial effort is still necessary to produce fissionable material. U-235 or plutonium; yet even this obstacle is not what it used to be. Nuclear power plants, which are commercially available, cannot help making plutonium out of nonfissionable uranium while they are producing electricity. To separate the plutonium in "weaponsgrade" purity is a difficult and dangerous job that has to be done by remote control behind thick concrete shields, but there is little mystery about it.

Only a little plutonium—about 10 lbs. —is needed, chiefly as a detonator. Modern nuclear weapons get most of their power from comparatively plentiful fusion materials, such as lithium and deuterium (heavy hydrogen). The nation that makes or acquires a few plutonium detonators can upgrade them without much difficulty into city-busting H-bombs. "The cost of deuterium," says one British scientist, "is about like good champagne."