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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1951 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 18, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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That being said, how far is Iran from nukes? I know they're not Japan-level "could be any time in the next month if they put their mind to it", but they've been working on it for a while.

There's more to it than just throwing together some plutonium for warheads. You really want hydrogen bombs for good yields, lower mass and higher cost-efficiency, they're less irradiating too. You need a secure delivery mechanism, long range missiles of the kind Japan isn't supposed to have. You need warhead miniaturization for practicality. Gravity bombs won't be all that useful - why would you need to use nuclear weapons if you have that kind of air superiority? It'd take a while to turn a technical nuclear weapon capability into practical nuclear arms.

The Israelis and Israeli-adjacent media have been fearmongering that Iran is months away from nuclear weapons for the last 20-30 years, nobody knows the real status of the Iranian nuclear program except the Iranians. Iran nuclearizing induces ugly dynamics, Saudi nuclearization amongst other things.

You need a secure delivery mechanism, long range missiles of the kind Japan isn't supposed to have.

Point of order: Japan already has long-range missiles that, as today's events have demonstrated, can accurately deliver a payload to targets roughly 400,000km away. It is as trivial to make a missile of that sort deliver a payload onto an arbitrary spot on the Earth as it is to deliver a car to an arbitrary orbit.

The Iranian space program is... a bit less developed by comparison.

Your average space-rocket makes a poor long range missile. They're extremely big and obvious targets, not protected in siloes or road-mobile. They take a long time to be readied for firing, many are liquid fuelled and need that to be pumped in. I'd imagine they'd have absolutely enormous radar signatures and would be relatively slow by ICBM standards - ideal targets for missile defence.

The Iranians have real experience firing off long-range missile into contested airspace, combatting missile defence. They have a lot of missiles and launchers, hidden and defensible.

I have no doubt that Japan has the technical capacity to produce long-range missiles but there's more to establishing practical capabilities than converting civilian rockets.

Hard to say for certain but I suspect that it's a lot closer than official narratives would have you believe. The Disconnect between CNN's estimates and Janes' is one of the reasons Obama's "Iran Deal" was so contentious.

Just spit-balling but I'd guess 3 months to a Year if they decide to go for it in earnest and Israel doesn't respond with a preemptive strike. In contrast I'd put estimate the Japanese at something like 6-8 weeks if the cultural baggage and budgetary issues were to be hand-waved away.

In contrast I'd put estimate the Japanese at something like 6-8 weeks

How would that work out with the need to refine enough weapons grade plutonium / uranium?

The time needed to gather/refine the materials is part of why my estimate is 6 - 8 weeks instead of 36 hours to a week.

Probably with Japan accepting design compromises to build a working nuke off of reactor-grade uranium- IIRC South Africa did that back in the day, and a shitty gun-type nuke is a lot better than nothing.

You can't build a deployable nuke out of reactor-grade uranium. Even for highly enriched uranium, you need tens of kilograms of it. Plutonium is much more efficient, which is why everyone who can uses it. A "shitty gun-type nuke" needs even more of the material than implosion type weapon since it's significantly less efficient at getting enough of the material to go critical before the whole thing blows up.

There was a scandal a while back that makes me uncomfortable about putting the United States of America on the list of countries that can make advanced hydrogen bombs.

I'd imagine the destructive power of any bombs our adversaries could field top out at Hiroshima, and mostly are “dirty bombs.”

For what that's worth, which ain't much.

I thought Japan was ‘in theory 36 hours, but they’d have to get all their people in a room together so more like a week in practice?’

I definitely agree that if Iran decided they needed a nuclear weapon now, they could have one in less than a year. But 3, 6, and 8 months are very different timeframes with very different implications.

This is one area where if Kishida stays in power in Japan things will stay interesting. Abe talked about Japan hosting nukes but Kishida has been powerfully in favor of nuclear de-armament his whole life and has helped lead international efforts in that space. He was actually the Congressional representative from Hiroshima so it's personal for him and his constituents. That said, his reputation as a lifelong dove in general enabled him to finally boost defense spending without any real complaints, whereas when Abe tried to do the same he understandably made everyone nervous. So Kishida's anti-weapon, anti-war credentials ironically makes the citizenry trust him more to be responsible with actually wielding weapons and war. Nukes are still totally unthinkable for now, but in a situation many steps down the road with a lot of other factors changing plus a national emergency, he's still the highest potential leader they've ever had to facilitate an unthinkable situation.

My estimation for Japan is basically, 1 week to finalize a design (assuming they don't already have one on file), a second week to gather the necessary materials/personnel, and then 4 - 6 weeks to actually build, test, and deploy a handful of functional bombs.

The timeline for Iran is a lot hazier simply because the available information is far less reliable. Though I do agree with you regarding the implications.

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