Now if only they had some that actually worked...
Trust me.....it's not all that hard to make one "work".........with the right basic tools and materials, your average HS shop could whip one right up........
2 - sub critical pieces of weapons-grade fissionable material (appropriately shaped and contained)
1 - six-foot piece of one-inch pipe
1 - fabricated metal framework
1 - 12-gauge shotgun shell (shot removed)
1 - primer impact pendulum
1 - remote triggering device (two cell phones with a contact relay)
Voila! A simple 5-kiloton (yield approximate, based on quantity of fissionable material) nuclear weapon
The "trick" is to do it without killing everything that comes within 100 yards of it while you are making it.........
would it be "safe"? Hell no, but would it work.....most likely.......
The complexities of nuke weapons manufacture is making them fit the particular application, i e., missle warhead, artillery shell, torpedo, air-dropped bomb, etc. and making them function at 100% reliability over a long shelf life, with minimum maintenance. Also providing appropriate security and arming safeguards, providing safety for all those personnel that have to handle, store, maintain, and load them for use........these aspects make them highly complex, and rightly so, but just making one go BOOM.....ain't such a big deal.....
I suspect that North Korea's nuke weapons program is as much about being able to build a reliable weapon that they can sell to others to raise cash, as it is about using them for their own purposes. In order to make them "saleable" they have to make them essentially "world-class"......
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