[Mikey_1962]

There's a BIG difference between having the materials and making the final product.

Ever tried putting up dry wall or ceramic tiling? Both looked easy to me. The final product was, well, less than satisfactory.

Multiply that times the National Debt and you are in the ball park of the degree of difficulty of making a fission bomb.

[Olog-hai]

It’s the “nuclear umbrella” principle, ultimately. Besides, even dirty bombs would be satisfactory to Hezbollah and Hamas.

[null and void]

Yeah. We did it with slide rules and non-automated machine tools.

And we didn’t even know if it could even be done when we started.

[nuconvert]

“difficulty of making a fission bomb”

What makes you think they need to?

[tacticalogic]

I don't think a fission bomb is all that hard to build, once you have enough of the right kind of fissionables.

Building a working fusion (thermonuclear) bomb seems to be considerably more complicated.

[DB]

Sorry, but the “hard” part is acquiring the fissile material that is high quality.

The rest is relatively easy.

It doesn’t matter much that the result is “dirty” or inefficient at turning most of the material into energy.

[TigersEye]

Your drywall and tiling job probably would have turned out OK if you had an experienced Russian contractor at your side giving you pointers.