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Would'nt Saddam have to test his newly aquired nuke to be sure the device worked? Would we not detect a test blast that worked?

Would we not then act premptively?

Would'nt Saddam have to test his newly aquired nuke to be sure the device worked? Would we not detect a test blast that worked?

No. As AdamSelene235 pointed out, we never tested the Little Boy gun design before we unleashed it on Hiroshima (what we exploded in Los Alamos a month earlier was the Fat Man implosion design). Indeed, for Saddam's purposes, even if his scientists came up with a brand-new design, a failed live shot would be almost as effective as a successful one.

"Would'nt Saddam have to test his newly aquired nuke to be sure the device worked? Would we not detect a test blast that worked?"

Hard to say. Getting U-235 or plutonium (or even U-238) is problematic, and your final "purity" of the isotope is a relative thing. Maybe your processes (or seller) can get it to 90% pure. Maybe to 94.2% pure.

But you as the nuclear engineer will have to know the precise purity level.

Why? Because the "critical mass" will depend upon that purity, the shape, and a host of other smaller factors. If at any time during your manufacturing process or construction process you have more of the material in one place than the critical mass, then you just vaporized yourself and a couple of square miles of now-depreciated real-estate in what was once your research lab or assembly area.

So you've got to know your precise purity, and THEN your math has to be precise for that purity, shape, et al.

Oh, and every second that passes means that all of your mathematical equations change because all of the materials that you are working with have very different half-lives that change your purity level (e.g Polonium at 138 days, tritium at x days, U-235 at y days, et al).

If you don't have enough fissionable material when you chose to detonate the bomb, then it will merely "fizzle" (i.e. all ya get is a dirty bomb). If you have too much fissionable material, then it explodes as you are constructing it.

And consider that back in WW2, the one side that the world erroneously considered was the most technically advanced (i.e. the Germans), goofed the math and derived the WRONG quantity needed for reaching critical mass. So it's pretty easy to get the whole nuke angle wrong, and the math error might not give you a second chance, if ya know what I mean.

So knowing all of that, the prudent R&D team will at the very least measure the amount of material necessary for a self-sustaining chain reaction (and hope that all of their other fissionable material is precisely the same purity) so that the correct quantities for reaching critical mass can be derived (and who knows, perhaps the self-sustaining chain reaction test can be detected by some means).

Then armed with those precise values, construction teams can then begin to try to shape and form the proper amount of fissionable material per the warhead design of their choice, and if they make an error of not very large proportions at any time, then things don't work out as planned for them.