If the Bomb Is So Easy to Make, Why Don't More Nations Have It?:
"LIBYA has pledged to dismantle its atomic weapons program. That is obviously good news, in addition to being a victory for George W. Bush's aggressive foreign policy. But what, exactly, is Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi giving up? Not much.

'Libya was in no position to obtain access to nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future,' says a statement by the Federation of American Scientists, an independent group that tracks arms control issues. After visiting Libya last week, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, declared the country's program at 'very much at an early stage.' Libya may be closing down its nuclear program because it wasn't working anyway."

This points to an important reality about nuclear weapons: they are extremely difficult to make. Claims that bomb plans can be downloaded from the Internet, or that fissile material is easily obtained on the black market and slapped together into an ultimate weapon, seem little more than talk-radio jabber. Nations like Libya that have made determined attempts to obtain atomic munitions have not even come close.

Saddam Hussein, while leader of Iraq, spent billions of dollars and many years pursuing atomic weapons, without success. It now appears his nuclear program was put into limbo sometime during the 1990's, perhaps for the pragmatic reason that it wasn't working. Pakistan, which may have played a role in various other bomb efforts in the developing world, had hundreds of engineers working for decades to devise its atomic device. North Korea devoted a high percentage of national resources to decades' worth of research before, probably, it acquired an atomic bomb. Iran's nuclear program, which dates to the last shah, has been working on a weapon for a quarter century so far.

In Libya's case, beginning in the 1970's the government sought assistance of various kinds from Pakistan, China and the former Soviet Union. Soviet technicians helped Libya build a small research reactor at a place called Tajura. The Qaddafi regime later tried, unsuccessfully, to buy a large power-generation reactor from a Belgian company, possibly hoping it could be refitted for production of weapons material.

Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that American forces recently seized a shipload of centrifuge equipment bound for Libya. The seizure might have been a factor in Colonel Qaddafi's decision to abandon his pursuit of nuclear weapons - though Washington officials said that before the ship was seized, American intelligence agents had already quietly visited Libya, at Colonel Qaddafi's invitation, to inspect the sites that the country proposed to shutter.

Atomic bombs have proved difficult for countries like Libya to make for several reasons. The "enrichment" of uranium or plutonium to weapons-grade concentrations is a fantastically complex undertaking, involving reactors that cost billions of dollars or centrifuge facilities that are also costly and complicated. Atomic bomb engineering and fabrication involve extremely precise calculations, exotic materials and unusual specialized components that even enormous cost-is-no-object government programs in the United States and the old Soviet Union found hard to manufacture.

Attempts by developing nations to make an ultimate weapon have gone slowly even though they have concentrated on atomic bombs - the kind dropped on Japan in 1945 - rather than the far more powerful thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, which have never been used, except in tests.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/weekinreview/04east.html?pagewanted=all&position=