Nukes and You

[Flo]

dont look in any caves in my country. there is nothing to see

[Seperallis]

Most of what I'm about to write (until I get to the point on possible restrictions) is really for fact and consideration only, and doesn't really address whether we should have nuclear weapons. Ultimately I find the question of whether it's possible to have nuclear power and not nuclear weapons to be a completely academic sideshow that doesn't matter to the core question of how having nuclear weapons adds to or detracts from the quality and enjoyability of RP.

Regarding justifying the development of nuclear technology in this world without bombs - it definitely would have happened.

Snipped the rest for brevity. Zab's not the only one to think this, either.

The short of it is that you cannot separate early nuclear energy knowledge from early nuclear weaponry knowledge, as the latter is far too simple to create once you have the former. The fundamental core design of nuclear energy reactors came before nuclear weapons development; this is because they were necessary to prove the concept that you could control the output and chain reaction of a critical mass of material, and once you learn about critical mass it is simply one accident or experiment away from discovering super-criticality. Uranium isotopes in this early instance get chosen because, like Zab said, they so readily fissure when bombarded with neutron radiation that you can do it with early rudimentary equipment and whatever radium you happen to have on hand.

People seem to think nuclear weapons are some complex affair that require years of development. Nuclear weapons that work via fission are exceptionally simple devices,. Ignoring the even simpler "dirty bomb" (where you just take your radioactive material and explode it across the landscape), a fission bomb is essentially three basic parts: a lump of sub-critical radioactive material, some conventional explosive that kick-starts the supercritical reaction, and a crucible to contain the reaction and pressure until you get the boom you want. The foundations for this knowledge come directly from the questions and experiments to sustain "peaceful" nuclear reactor. You can spend additional time experimenting to get a worthwhile explosive yield, developing an ideal weapons delivery system, making it safer to handle, learning more efficient and destructive methods like fusion...but these extra time-consuming tasks are irrelevant to the fact that you can get your first atomic explosion some months after your first reactor. The knowledge to know how to do so cannot be separated from the pursuit of so-called "peaceful" knowledge: they are one and the same.

Whether states use that knowledge to create weapons is an entirely separate matter. I have not and probably never will have a nation with a nuclear weapons arsenal

Such development would also allow for wildly varied development of nuclear technology - countries that developed nuclear power first would likely stick with Uranium reactors (with early nuclear tech it would be much easier to produce these, and once a nuclear industry gets created around it it'll be difficult to change) while those that develop it later on might (depending on whether or not the person controlling the country wants it) develop something like thorium.

I still like this idea as an idea for when people decide to develop their own nuclear programs in RP.


On possible restrictions:
Just a quick thing that popped into my head. I'm all for nations starting with nuclear weapons technology. However, one possible restriction to consider is that, regardless of whether someone says their country is a nuclear power or is becoming one, they cannot bring said nukes to bare until they've concluded a/several satisfactory thread(s)...could be backstory, could be continuing development, could be whatever. For example, say Zab concludes a good quality thread about Akitsu's nuclear development and subsequent abandonment; even though he doesn't have a nuclear armed state, he'd be allowed to use them if he so chose because he's shown clear maturity in how to handle them.

I personally want no restrictions, and think players should create the IC global apparatus themselves that punishes dickhole nations for using/attaining WMDs instead of creating OOC rulings and restrictions because of hypotheticals based on actions from 6 years ago. But, it's an option.

[Flo]

My fist will be the IC apparatus to punish dickhole nations.

[Zabuza825]

Nuclear weapons that work via fission are exceptionally simple devices,.

I did snip quite a bit for brevity, but yes that statement and paragraph is not wrong. However it still doesn't change the fact that in real life, it takes many years for countries to develop a nuclear bomb. The bomb itself is a simple mechanism, but the path there is not so simple.

This is largely due to the significant amount of resources needed to secure and produce the nuclear fissile material. For example, the difficulty with uranium weapons comes from creating enough of the isotope Uranium-235 for you to be able to turn it into a weapon. The predominant isotope of Uranium (Uranium-238) is NOT fissile, and must be "enriched" for you to get isotopes. Uranium-235 is one of the easier ones to discover, and in fact was the one used in the Hiroshima bomb. But it still required a LOT of research and MASSIVE facilities to produce, at least on the scale that allowed the US to produce an actual bomb out of it.

So yeah, to summarize what I'm saying, the bomb itself might be a simple device, but the path that leads to the bomb is not.

Now, all of that having been said, all of these challenges are the very same ones that developing fuel for nuclear power has. So yeah, if we're talking purely about realism and NOT about whether or not we should allow it, a country has nuclear reactors then theoretically they would also have the capacity to create a nuclear weapon if it doesn't already have one. A good real life example of this is Japan IRL - it has an extensive nuclear power industry and a lot of expertise in nuclear technology, and because of that many observers believe that even though it doesn't have nuclear weapons and has never developed them, if it chose to develop one it would be able to relatively quickly.

On possible restrictions:
Just a quick thing that popped into my head. I'm all for nations starting with nuclear weapons technology. However, one possible restriction to consider is that, regardless of whether someone says their country is a nuclear power or is becoming one, they cannot bring said nukes to bare until they've concluded a/several satisfactory thread(s)...could be backstory, could be continuing development, could be whatever. For example, say Zab concludes a good quality thread about Akitsu's nuclear development and subsequent abandonment; even though he doesn't have a nuclear armed state, he'd be allowed to use them if he so chose because he's shown clear maturity in how to handle them.

I like this idea!

EDIT: Changed order of some sentences.

[Raz]

IF we go for a soft-ban of some sort, I still like my idea to use some past pseudo-cataclysmic event to explain both the ban and the scrambled up world.

[Flo]

crashed colony ships \o/

[Seperallis]

crashed colony ships \o/

+1

[Flo]

all the cool kids did crashed colony ships

[Mestra]

Just to chime in, I don't see too much issue allowing them. It should be unlikely that all nations could feasibly design, operate, and build such devices in the first place. The whole thing should self-regulate itself.