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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear secrecy is a fascinating blog about this sort of thing. The designation “top secret” was first used for the Manhattan project, which of course the military developed in secret, and then unleashed upon an unsuspecting world by announcing it had destroyed the two Japanese cities.

But still to this day, all the nuclear weapons stuff is shrouded in mystery and secrecy. How they dispose of the waste … classified, how the bombs work, people have ideas, but all classified. The nuclear policy is also opaque and non-democratic.

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As an outside observer, the US is a beacon of transparency on this topic.

In Israel the topic is under strict military censorship.

What little discussion is allowed has to periodically sprinkled with the incantation "according to foreign sources".

Israel's entire nuclear program leaked out thanks to one guy, whom they later entrapped on a cruise ship and extradited to Israel.

No buy the US keeps all the good secrets.

No buy? What does that mean?

Probably but rather than buy

He was presuaded to leave the UK for Rome, where he was kidnapped, drugged, and transported to a waiting Israeli Navy ship that carried him to Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu#Pursuit_and_c...

We don't even know if Israel has nuclear weapons. Most people think they they do, but it is neither confirmed nor denied by any official source.

Confirmation or denial wouldn't mean a thing, the real confirmation will come from either an insider leak (unlikely), a test (unlikely) or actual use (unlikely). So to all intents and purposes it is better if this is never resolved one way or the other, but the smart money is on Israel having between 80 and 100 warheads, with various bits of evidence to back that up. The bigger question in my opinion is what size those warheads are rather than whether they have them or not and whether or not any of them are H-Bombs rather than just fission devices. Other questions revolve around operational readiness.

Let's hope we'll never know for sure because I believe the most likely of those three unlikely possibilities is actual use. And that would be very bad news for the world indeed.

>the real confirmation will come from either an insider leak (unlikely)

Already happened years ago, see elsewhere in this thread. There's also the Vela incident, for which one of the few plausible explanations is an Israeli-SouthAfrican bomb test.

I'm aware of that but it didn't - as far as I understand it - conclusively prove that the Israelis actually had working devices and could well have been a misinformation campaign. I've read a lot about this and even though that would be quite far out I can't rule out the possibility, there are just too many layers to all of this to know with 100% certainty what is true and what is not.

Also note that we're talking about the present, what happened years ago may or may not be reflective of what the situation was back then, but it definitely won't say much about what the state of affairs is today.

On the article about Vanunu it reads:

"Many critics argue that Vanunu had no additional information that would pose a real security threat to Israel and that its government's only motivation is to avoid political embarrassment and financial complications for itself and allies such as the United States. By not acknowledging possession of nuclear weapons, Israel avoids a US legal prohibition on funding countries that proliferate weapons of mass destruction. Such an admission would prevent Israel from receiving over $2 billion each year in military and other aid from Washington."

Which is another very high likelihood option with regards to the reason for this policy.

Knowledge is determined by official government sources now?

We know they have the bomb, nothing in Middle Eastern geopolitics makes sense except in light of this fact. It's like a black hole that you can observe by how it bends the light of objects behind it. Politicians have to play a silly game of pretend around the whole thing but normal people don't.

That's not 100% true though, but for the most part it is. The moment Israel demonstrates that they do have the bomb; for instance by using one or exploding one for test purposes the perception of Israel would change and this in turn would cause a change in attitude towards Israel. It would also telegraph what kind of yields they have which would say a lot about their capabilities. They are clearly very much aware of this and that is the main reason for the 'refuse to confirm or deny'. Some things are more powerful when left to the imagination of the perceived enemies.

There are a number of countries that are not officially listed as having nuclear weapons, but probably do, because of how easy they are to build in the 21st century. Japan is one common example of a state that is officially not a nuclear state, but people generally consider them de facto one anyhow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_progr...

I mean, ultimately, we're talking about a device that was built nearly 90 years ago. They've only gotten easier to build since then. Absent international regulation and oversight, a motivated startup and modestly-well-funded startup could put them together today, no problem. Not the deluxe MIRV ICBMs nation states have, but something on par with the ones used in WWII? No problem.

Having a bomb and delivering a working bomb to a target are vastly different things.

If a country has a bomb, then they have a bomb sitting around somewhere. It is common knowledge that the nuclear superpowers have a lot of trouble, especially these days, around maintenance and infrastructure. You've got to develop and build good missiles or aircraft to send those bombs out somewhere, and you've got to maintain the whole chain in working order for as long as it takes. They've probably got to stay on high alert 24/7, because you never know when you'll need to press the button and send the bomb to the target.

Just building a nuclear bomb without its concomitant delivery system means you'll have to get creative to deliver it. Good luck putting it on on a truck and driving it to the target or something. At that point, you'd rather just have a dirty bomb instead: a lot easier to make, and just deliver it to a convenient highly-populated spot where it'll make a big stink.

South Korea is taking an interesting approach. They have been building the delivery systems, cruise missiles, IRBMs, and SSBNs, that are useful conventionally but could be adapted for nuclear warheads.

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ - for anyone concerned that googling ‘nuclear secrecy’ might get them put on a list.

For those interested, Restricted Data is a fascinating book in this vein.

The blog they referred to and the book you mentioned are both by the same author :)

Alex Wellerstein.

Why is everyone in this thread so cagey about revealing information? Is it on a need-to-know basis?

I honestly don’t mind that it’s opaque and non democratic

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