Israel’s desire for thermonuclear weapons is not at all surprising. Not because they consider their Uranium bombs to be too heavy and plan to retire them. Or because of bureaucratic infighting between the Khans. If Pakistan is breeding plutonium, that is most likely because the Pakistanis believe that this is now the cheapest way to give them a combined inventory of deliverable Pu and HEU weapons sufficient for whatever they consider a reasonable deterrent. 12, there were no particularly lightweight, plutonium-only bombs in the early US arsenal, and no shortage of moderately lightweight bombs that would have been quite suitable as warheads for Pakistan's present missiles. Back of the envelope, I get an HEU-based equivalent of the Trinity Gadget weighing in at all of 8% heavier than the historic plutonium version.Īnd, also historically, we know that the United States shifted fairly early to composite cores, and to interchangeable cores, to make the most complete and efficient use of whatever mix of fissile materials became available. Even in a relatively lightweight (500-1000 kg) missile warhead with an HEU core, the tamper will likely outweigh the fissile material by a substantial margin, and the implosion assembly has to compress them both. That means A: implosion devices and B: a substantial reflector/tamper surrounding the fissile core.
Of greater relevance to Pakistan is the need to economize on fissile materials. In particular, I note that the W-33 8″ nuclear artillery shell was pretty clearly a uranium warhead, delivering ~10 kt from a ~100 kg package, and I don’t see Pakistan having any urgent need or desire to field weapons in the <<100 kg class. I am skeptical of the claim that uranium warheads are generally and substantially heavier than plutonium ones. The impending eclipse of the enrichment program at Kahuta Research Laboratories by a PAEC-dominated plutonium program is precisely the last thing AQ Khan would enjoy living long enough to see. Pakistan’s rapidly expanding plutonium program is the legacy of AQ Khan’s long-time bureaucratic rival, the late Munir Ahmad Khan. As David Albright has noted, Pakistan is making significant progress on the construction of a fourth plutonium production reactor. There are obvious reasons, of course, for AQ Khan to suddenly support capping Pakistan’s arsenal. And, as validators go, AQ Khan would be a pretty effective one in Pakistan for a cut-off. Of course, if there is a limit to Pakistan’s requirements, then Pakistan might conceivably support negotiation of a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty. “There is a limit to these requirements.” That’s very interesting. But there is a limit to these requirements. A country needs sufficient weapons to be stored at different places in order to have a second-strike capability.
As the pioneer of the program, my guess is that our efforts have been to perfect the design, reduce the size of the weapons to fit on the warheads of our missile systems, and ensure a fail-safe system for their storage. I have little knowledge of the present status of our program, as I left Kahuta, Pakistan’s main nuclear facility, 10 years ago. This time, though, he has chosen an English language venue - Newsweek, which is also the Daily Beast.Īfter having defended his actions in the op-ed, Khan talks a little about Pakistan’s need for continuing modernization of its nuclear deterrent: Khan has been chatty lately, although largely in the form of an Urdu-language blog that I can’t read.
I was going to suggest SEAL Team 6 make an encore performance in Pakistan, when I noticed that Khan said something else very interesting: there is a limit to Pakistan’s fissile material requirements. AQ Khan has written an oped in which he defends his efforts to produce nuclear weapons as necessary to “save my country from Indian nuclear blackmail.”
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