[section9]

The point has been made better than me by other posters: building Little Boy and Fat Man variants has been out in the wild now for at least 20 years (there's also a third way, Thin Man, which was an early design to use Plutonium in a gun-bomb design that was some 19 ft. long. Oppenheimer dropped it as impractical and concentrated on implosion....). The problem isn't the bomb; it's enriching the Uranium and extracting the Plutonium. Not every President-For-Life can just up and do this on a whim....

Be Seeing You,

Chris

[tobyhill]

You are exactly correct and if Saddam kept the know how this long and combined with the fact that he tried to buy Uranium from Niger then he had the intent to build a nuke weapon and probably on a fast track to keep up with his Jones', the Iranians.