Quote:
Originally Posted by LordBalfor
What an idiot Trump is proving himself to be. Thanks to the internationally approved deal worked out by the Obama administration, Iran had stopped it's nuclear enrichment process. Now that Trump violated that agreement - apparently just to undo anything Obama was involved with - Iran is now once again moving forward down the road to nuclear weapons (along with actively threatening the critical oil route through the Persian Gulf).
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Intelligent people understand that Enrichment
≠Nuclear Weapons.
Enrichment is just enrichment, unless you're enriching it to 90%.
Do you even know what you're talking about?
Do you even understand why the US and Russia prefer Pu-239 over U-235?
Do you understand the difference between fissionable and fissile?
U-238 is fissionable, but not fissile, because the fission of a U-238 nucleus does not release a sufficient number of neutrons to sustain a cascading chain reaction.
Pu-239 is preferred over U-235 because it releases more neutrons.
Every neutron does not coerce fission. It's all based on Probability & Statistics. There four possible outcomes of a free neutron and I'll list them from most-likely to least-likely:
1) the neutron flies around never striking a nucleus
2) the neutron has an inelastic collision with a nucleus causing the neutron to ricochet in a new direction
3) the neutron has an elastic collision with a nucleus causing it to be absorbed: U-235 becomes U-236 and Pu-239 becomes Pu-240
4) the neutron hits the "sweet spot" in an elastic collision and causes fission.
Do you understand the implication of that?
I show you a real-world example.
The US had a nuclear weapon with 10 pounds of Pu-239 with a max yield of 1.0 kt. It weighed 52 pounds.
The US had another nuclear weapon with 30 pounds of U-235 with a max yield of 0.1 kt weighing about 75 pounds.
Get it?
You should be able to deduce a few things from that. One, you need a helluva lot more U-235 to get the same results as Pu-239 and there's a limit to the amount you can use. That's called the limiting factor. The biggest Pu-239 warhead you can build in theory is 200 kt. To get more than that, you have to go fission-fusion. For U-235 it's 60 kt.
Iran doesn't have the ability to separate Pu-239 and its reactors aren't conducive to producing Pu-239 because they're not the same of reactors that North Korea has.
The biggest warhead Iran could make would be 60 kt. They have no aircraft to carry a beast like that, and to mount it on a missile, you'd need something equivalent to a Saturn V, which Iran does not have.
Iran could do what Pakistan does, and build 0.1 kt warheads for its field artillery guns, and 1-2 kt warheads for short-range missiles and 2 kt to 10 kt gravity bombs for delivery by aircraft and intermediate range missiles.
On the other hand, India has Pu-239 and their warheads are smaller in size, weigh less and have significantly higher yields than Pakistan's. Their short and intermediate range missiles and their aircraft can deliver 100 kt warheads.
Anyway, if you thought Iran would be raining 1 megaton warheads down on everyone, you're just fantasizing.
So what if Iran has 0.1 to 1 kt warheads? That would stop a US invasion, but they won't be bombing other countries.
That's really the whole point. The US wants to invade Iran, but it fears Iran's arsenal of surface-to-surface anti-ship missiles and adding small yield nuclear weapons to the mix doesn't advance the US cause.
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