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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3314 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 22, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Watching Dune and rereading the Dune Encyclopedia (see screenshot) has me thinking - how could a private citizen start accumulating / creating a stock of family atomics? Would it even be possible with Bezos level wealth in the modern day, considering the problems of sourcing the materials/expertise without facing legal sanction?

I've read estimates that North Korea spent in the ballpark of 1.5-2 billion USD to develop its nuclear capacity in the last 50 years, I wonder if it would be possible for someone without the state capacity of a nation to do it privately. At the risk of being put on a list somewhere, I'd have to say it would be pretty awesome to have some 'family atomics'. Like having a big ass gun to deter criminals/home invaders, except this gun can be pointed against nation-states.

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Your best bet is attempting to buy out part of a stockpile of a failing nuclear state.

Best bet would be either Pakistan or NK.

Good luck beating the Saudis to the punch in the former, and for both cases, expect very angry DEVGRU to show up at one point. Someone is going to be pissed if you try.

If you have that much money, you can probably acquire fissile materials and even own a reactor legally, and you could hire all the nuclear physicists and engineers you like. It's the enrichment process and building the nukes in a safe manner that would be extremely difficult to pull off, unless you managed to pay some seriously hefty bribes, and convincing most countries to let you amass a nuclear arsenal is one of the few things that you can't buy with money, much like US can't just hand Xi Jinping $100 billion to fuck off.

It's probably easier just to coup an existing country that has them, or co-opt a non-nuclear power with a degree of sovereignty that is miraculously respected after your antics.

Estimating what North Korea 'spends' is very hard. It's an actual planned economy for the most part. You do your work at a state enterprise and you get rations. You're not buying a house, it gets allotted to you. A lot of economic activity happens outside the market and exchange rates are a bit of a joke. Just because a farmer isn't paid $1000 for a $1000 worth of wheat, it doesn't mean the wheat is worth less. If you look at a list of countries by GDP, North Korea is lower than Palestine or Niger, I think that's nonsense.

North Korea's nuclear capabilities cost way more than $1-2 billion. Maybe $10 billion? A reactor alone would cost about a billion.

To get a credible nuclear capability you need a reactor for plutonium and you need the precision engineering for the explosive lens (which isn't too hard honestly). You'll need land you can stage a test on to prove your capability.

Reactors are easy to find (massive heat source), so maybe you go down the ultracentrifuge path for uranium. Uranium enrichment is easier to hide but needs rather specialist, monitored tools. Either you buy your ultracentrifuges somehow evading sanctions or you have quite good engineering skills.

The hardest part is credible delivery. You need fairly advanced rocketry. Solid fuel rockets for a quick launch, preferably road-mobile so you can hide them and play shell games with them. You need powerful early warning radar and preferably a satellite or two for over-the-horizon view. These rockets need to be tested as well. The warheads need to be miniaturized to fit on them, then there's guidance (you're not gonna be using GPS) so either you have your own satellite constellation or you relearn the arcane art of inertial guidance or celestial navigation. It's a pretty big R&D project.

The only person who could do this is Elon, Bezos's Blue Origin is a complete joke. The man can't even make civilian rockets properly, he can't make military weapons.

If you look at a list of countries by GDP, North Korea is lower than Palestine or Niger, I think that's nonsense.

North Korea has a substantially worse quality of life than Palestine (West Bank or even Gaza when not being invaded), less food, fewer consumer goods, higher rate of famine etc. Niger is indeed still poorer. As you say estimating things like median income in NK is kind of dumb, but quality of life does provide an indicator and extensive, regular bouts of starvation since the 1990s suggest an extraordinarily inefficient economy and impoverished society, especially outside Pyongyang.

That said, I agree completely that you can’t really translate these costs in a communist economy, this was also the mistake Western economists made when they underestimated by a huge amount just how poor the USSR was.

The Soviet Union wasn't that poor all things considered, it just allocated a very high proportion of resources to military development. 10-15% of GDP was tied up in armaments, 10-15% of the labour force IIRC. North Korea is similarly focused on military power at the expense of civilian goods. But military goods are still valuable.

North Korea has a life expectancy of 72, Palestine was apparently at 74, so I'd agree that Palestine has a higher quality of life. Having access to the internet is also a good thing! Yet North Korea is an advanced economy, it's not like most African countries where the government runs off mining rent, totally bereft of industry. The total GDP of North Korea, not merely per capita, can't possibly be lower than Palestine as the official statistics say. The economy isn't a complete shambles - they had a lot of hunger recently due to COVID and shutting the border with China but that's really an external factor.

The only person who could do this is Elon, Bezos's Blue Origin is a complete joke. The man can't even make civilian rockets properly, he can't make military weapons.

One of these days I'll have to bite the bullet and do a deep dive on the absolute state of the space industry, because it feels like the commentary on it is as polarized as Drag Queen Story Hour. What's supposed to be so improper about Blue Origin's rockets?

Well they started 2 years before SpaceX, they have no shortage of cash and they still haven't reached orbit!

First of all, they're going to Mars this year, from what I understand. But even that aside, how does that make them a joke? A sub-orbital rocket is a perfectly fine delivery mechanism for a nuke, and Blue Origin's seem to be working just fine.

You'd have to start by building your own financial system. Nobody actually has $1bn, they have various contractual legal agreements that entitle them to $1bn that is actually in the possession of various other entities (most of which only possess them in a complex web of transactions going back to the US Federal reserve). It would be comically easy to prevent an individual like Bezos from accessing his wealth once it were found out that he was engaged in building a nuke.

It might be possible to purchase the first one, and from there become a state. But that's a different animal altogether.

100% agree, but get more creative?

How much money would you need to avoid that failure state (prevention of access to your capital)? If that requires something other than money, how much money does it take to acquire that something? Etc.

North Korea did it operating largely using nascent cryptocurrency tech to fund and hide its transactions, but is that really feasible currently with tighter KYCs?

North Korea’s program predates crypto, they just dealt with the Pakistanis. The Pakistani ISI is probably better surveilled by the US today, though, and would probably sell out an American anyway.

Some degree of sovereignty is needed, in which case you are no longer Mr Money, Private Citizen.

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