PREVIEW: PLUTONIUM: Colleague Henry Sokolski of NPEC comments on the question, if a nation possesses plutonium, does it have a nuclear weapon?
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2025
⏱️ 2 minutes
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1945 Trinity
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| 0:25.9 | This is John Batchel, a conversation with my colleague, Henry Sikolsky, of the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center, about plutonium. If you have plutonium, are you far from the bomb? |
| 0:33.1 | The plutonium issue comes up because South Korea, Japan, even Saudi Arabia, potentially going to |
| 0:42.2 | produce plutonium in these next years. China uses the explanation that plutonium can be stopped |
| 0:49.6 | from being used in a bomb, this decision made by the Department of Energy. |
| 0:55.9 | The Chinese used that as a way of saying, we're not making bombs. |
| 1:00.5 | We're developing nuclear power. |
| 1:02.9 | I ask Henry directly, if you have plutonium, do you have a bomb? |
| 1:07.5 | Here's his answer. |
| 1:08.4 | Very straightforward. |
| 1:09.8 | Much more of this tonight. |
| 1:14.1 | Pretty quickly. Pretty quickly. The bomb design that we used for the uranium bomb, |
| 1:22.5 | the little boy, did not need to be tested. People say, oh, we need to test the plutonium bomb because it doesn't |
| 1:29.1 | use a gun device, which is very simple. It, you know, involves an implosion device. The implosion |
| 1:36.9 | design is now roughly, you know, three quarters of a century old. It's made the rounds. I don't even think you need to test |
| 1:45.0 | that. So the short answer is, yeah, I think so. I think, you know, if you get the fuel, the bomb is not far, |
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