THE US has boasted of bombing Iranian nuclear infrastructure – with president Donald Trump bragging that American strikes had caused “monumental damage”.
Iran does not have nuclear weapons but does hold stockpiles of enriched uranium, a key component in making nuclear bombs.
To those unfamiliar with the science behind making nuclear weapons, it may seem like very risky business indeed to bomb the raw materials involved in making weapons of mass destruction.
We spoke to a nuclear scientist to explain why simply bombing stores of enriched uranium is not enough to cause a nuclear explosion.
Professor David Ireland, a nuclear physicist at Glasgow University, told The National that the US strikes were not equivalent to bombing stores of chemical weapons, for instance.
He explained that to create a nuclear bomb, there must be a “critical mass” of uranium concentrated “in a very small area”.
Prof Ireland added: “The one that hit Hiroshima, the way they did that was they had two bits of uranium that were not in themselves critical masses but when you pushed them together, they became a critical mass.
“That’s what the bomb was: it was two bits of uranium, you drop the bomb, the two bits of uranium get exploded so that they contact each other, it goes critical, it blows up in a nuclear reaction.”
Given the obvious safety concerns associated with nuclear weapons, uranium is stored in such a way that it does not constitute a critical mass, Prof Ireland said.
But the Glasgow University academic added that even if a bomb hit a nuclear warhead, it would be extremely unlikely to cause a nuclear reaction, so specific are the conditions required to make one.
He said: “They have to be armed, they have to implode something with precisely the right timing and so on and if that doesn’t happen, nothing happens.”
Prof Ireland added: “What you’re trying to do is get all this uranium-235 to get into a volume small enough that it can sustain a chain reaction for long reaction for long enough to go explosive. That’s quite difficult to do.”
