[Big A]

And you never heard of.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...about?page=0,1

Burma
Bangladesh
Kazakhstan
Venezueal
The U.A.E.

[S.T.D.]

Kazakstan had nukes before - from the Soviet days. And nukes were tested there. Currently it's the place of Baikanur - the primary Russian kosmodrom.

[Slonopotam845]

Right that. The Russians wanted to stop paying for that and have had plans in place for several years to migrate their main launch site to Svobodny 17 in the Amur Oblast. But apparently that was shut down. Plesetsk is still active and it has the added bonus of being well located to hurl objects into polar orbits - good for spy satellites. It will probably be expanded in the future to handle heavier lifters.

[PhillipHer]

The global community is not capable of managing the spread of nukes. Even if we stop Iran, there's still North Korea which we let acquire and is arguably just as bad or worse a threat. Eventually nuke technology and equipment will be so widespread it will be easy for any country to just buy the stuff, and from there, corporations, and then terrorists.

[Raj_Copi_Jin]

It's still not a trivial exercise to build an atomic bomb. It's a mistake to believe that it is. While it's true that the Hiroshima uranium bomb was never tested before hand and the Trinity test, the first atomic explosion was a test of the Nagasaki bomb, a completely utterly different design that used plutonium not uranium, the work that went into the theory, design and fabrication of the Hiroshima bomb and the others, was massive. It took $4 billion dollars in 1945 money. About 2 billion to build the nuclear materials separation facilities at Oak Ridge, Hanford and other places. And about $2 billion to build the Los Alamos facility, staff it and run it and build Bombs 1, 2 and 3. Now let's say for the sake of argument that today the methods are 10x more efficient. That still leaves a massive debt and and even more massive pile of nuclear waste. I would expect that a crash program like Iran's - even though it's slow moving, will eventually generate incalculable environmental damage as well as significant long term diseases and deaths from nuclear materials and related chemical toxicity.

[brraverishhh]

It's still not a trivial exercise to build an atomic bomb. It's a mistake to believe that it is.

I agree, but I think the problem is that with each additional country that acquires the technology, it makes it more likely another country will have someone willing to sell them technology, equipment, or outright bombs, making it progressively easier for any country to achieve their end goal as time goes on.

My worry is that this stuff becomes so common that the global community is desensitized, making it less likely that corrupt governments will be concerned with repercussions. This could lead up to the stuff just being outsourced to corporations in unstable countries and then you have huge risks.