Full transcript
0:00There are nine nuclear powers in the
0:02world. Most of them are democracies.
0:04Three of them are authoritarian. Between
0:07these three, they control thousands of
0:09nuclear warheads, enough to devastate
0:11human civilization in a single
0:13afternoon. And the list could get longer
0:16because right now, underneath [music] a
0:18mountain in Iran, there is a stockpile
0:20of uranium. Or at least there was.
0:23Before the war in June 2025,
0:25international inspectors had counted
0:27more than 440 kg of uranium enriched to
0:3160%. Enough if enriched further for
0:34roughly nine nuclear weapons. In June
0:372025, the United States tried to destroy
0:40Iran's nuclear program. American bombers
0:42dropped the largest bunker busting
0:44weapons in the entire arsenal straight
0:46through the rock above it. The sights
0:48were badly damaged, but there was one
0:51problem. The uranium itself was never
0:53accounted for. And more than a year
0:55later, the international inspectors,
0:57whose entire job it is to track that
0:59material, still cannot verify exactly
1:02where it is. I'll get back to this
1:04hidden uranium later in the video
1:06because we need to first figure out how
1:07we even got to this point. I mean, how
1:09does the most dangerous weapon ever
1:12built keep ending up in the hands of the
1:14world's most dangerous regimes? The
1:16answer starts 80 years ago with the
1:18Manhattan Project and the men who built
1:20the very first bomb in a desert in New
1:23Mexico. This laboratory was called Los
1:25Alamos and in the summer of 1945 they
1:28believed they were completely alone and
1:31their main adversary, the Soviet Union,
1:33was years behind. They were wrong
1:36because Los Alamos was full of spies.
1:38The most important one was a German
1:40physicist named Klaus Fuks. He had fled
1:43the Nazis, ended up in Britain and was
1:45sent to work on the American bomb as
1:47part of the British team. He was
1:49brilliant and trusted. So he sat in the
1:52meetings where they cracked the hardest
1:53problem of them all. How to build an
1:56impossion bomb. The principle of which
1:58is pretty simple to understand. Surround
2:00a bowl of plutonium with explosives and
2:02detonate them all at once, crushing the
2:05core from every side until it ignites.
2:08The tricky part here is precision.
2:10because if the squeeze is even slightly
2:12uneven, the whole thing fails.
2:14Eventually, they figured it out and Fuks
2:17handed all of this information to the
2:19Soviet Union. Now, why would he do this?
2:22Well, not for money. Fuks was a
2:24communist and had been since he was a
2:25student in Germany, which was the real
2:27reason the Nazis wanted him gone in the
2:29first place. He believed it was wrong
2:31for one single country to hold the
2:33ultimate weapon alone. Therefore,
2:35handing the design to the Soviet Union
2:37was, at least, according to him,
2:38creating balance. He stayed a loyal
2:41communist until the day he died. And
2:44folks was not the only leak. The two
2:46others were Julius and Ethl Rosenberg,
2:49who were arrested, tried, and sent to
2:51the electric chair in 1953 for stealing
2:54the secret of the atomic bomb. This is
2:57quite well known amongst the public. But
2:58the thing is, while Julius Rosenberg was
3:01a real spy, he was a minor one in this.
3:04The actual material came from Eel's
3:06brother, David Greenlas, a [music]
3:08machinist at Los Alamos, and his
3:10sketches were basic at best. Ethl's
3:13exact role remains disputed, and she was
3:15very likely executed to pressure her
3:17husband into naming names, but it didn't
3:21work, and the intelligence that mattered
3:22had already come from Fuks. So, did all
3:25this theft and spying actually buy
3:27stalling nuclear weapons of his own?
3:29Well, mostly yes. When the Soviet Union
3:31tested its first bomb on the 29th of
3:33August, 1949, it was almost an exact
3:36copy of the American bomb dropped on
3:37Nagasaki. This marked an important point
3:40in history because the world now
3:41understood the inner workings of the
3:43bomb could leak. And if it could leak,
3:46it could spread. So, it did. Bringing us
3:49to the second authoritarian state to get
3:51the bomb, China. And this time, it
3:54wasn't stolen. The Soviet Union
3:56literally offered to help. In the 1950s,
3:59China and the Soviet Union were
4:01communist allies, and Moscow agreed it
4:03would help China build the bomb. It sent
4:05advisors, technology, and even promised
4:07to hand over a working prototype weapon.
4:10But that handover never happened. In
4:121959, Soviet leader Nikita Kruev
4:15cancelled the deal. The following year,
4:17he pulled every Soviet specialist out of
4:19the country, and the promised prototype
4:21never arrived. Maadong's response was to
4:24keep going out of [music] spite. China
4:26renamed the program project 596 after
4:29June 1959, the month the Soviets walked
4:32away. And Mao reportedly said China
4:34would build the bomb even if the people
4:37had to pawn their pants to do it. It
4:39worked. On the 16th of October 1964,
4:42China detonated its first nuclear weapon
4:44on a 100 meter tower in the desert at
4:47Lnure. Now, this was just a fision bomb.
4:50The next leap was a thermonuclear or
4:53hydrogen bomb. hundreds of times more
4:55powerful and a far harder machine to
4:57build. It took the United States 7 years
5:00to go from the fishing bomb to the
5:01hydrogen bomb. But China did it in just
5:0432 months. The fastest anyone has ever
5:06made that leap. And a huge part of that
5:08speed came down to one physicist, Yumin.
5:12In the mid 1960s, Yumin cracked the core
5:15theoretical problem of a staged [music]
5:17thermonuclear weapon. The physics that
5:19made the whole thing work. And here is
5:21the strange part. Unlike almost every
5:23other senior nuclear scientist alive,
5:26Yumin was largely self-taught. In June
5:291967, China tested its first hydrogen
5:32bomb, mostly due to this man. But a
5:35powerful bomb is useless if you cannot
5:37deliver it onto a target. And for that,
5:40China received an extraordinary gift
5:42from the United States, believe it or
5:44not, by accident. This man's name was
5:47Kan Jizen. He was one of the most gifted
5:50rocket scientists alive and he built his
5:52career in America. He helped found the
5:55Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He held a top
5:58security clearance and worked on
5:59classified American missile programs.
6:02Then in the 1950s, during the
6:03anti-communist panic, the American
6:06government decided he might be a
6:08communist. So they stripped his
6:10clearance, detained him, and kept him
6:11under surveillance for 5 years. Then in
6:141955, they deported him to China. Kan
6:17then went on to become the father of the
6:19entire Chinese missile program. The
6:21rockets that carry China's nuclear wars
6:23today and the rockets that put China in
6:25space traced directly back to Kan. But
6:28if we now go to the other side of the
6:30world, we'll find our next stop on our
6:32authoritarian list of nuclear powers,
6:36Israel. Now, Israel has never officially
6:38admitted it has nuclear weapons, but it
6:41does. And the country that gave Israel
6:43much of what it needed to build them was
6:46France. [music]
6:47See, in the late 1950s, France secretly
6:50helped Israel construct a nuclear
6:52reactor in the desert near a town called
6:55Deona. France also helped build a secret
6:58plutonium reprocessing plant alongside
7:00[music] it. And according to its own
7:02former atomic chief, France handed
7:04Israel weapon design information, too.
7:07The reason France wanted to help Israel
7:09was because they shared a common enemy,
7:11the leader of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nazar.
7:14He was an enemy to Israel because he was
7:17the most powerful Arab leader on its
7:19border and openly hostile to Israel. For
7:22France, he was arming and funding the
7:24rebels who were trying to drive France
7:26out of its colony in Algeria. Now, the
7:28reason we can be sure Israel has nuclear
7:31weapons is because of one of its own
7:33technicians who decided the world
7:35deserve to know the truth. His name was
7:37Modai Banuno. He had worked inside Deona
7:40for years and in 1986 he walked out with
7:42around 60 photographs and told a British
7:45newspaper what was going on. It turned
7:47out Israel had secretly built an
7:49arsenal. While the newspaper was in the
7:51midst of verifying everything, Israeli
7:53intelligence found Banuno. A female
7:56Mossad agent chatted him up in London
7:58and lured him to Rome with a promise of
8:00a holiday. In Rome, he was drugged, tied
8:03up, and shipped back to Israel in
8:05secret. But Israel tried him behind
8:07closed [music] doors and sentenced him
8:09to 18 years for treason and espionage. A
8:12pretty wild story. But here's the thing.
8:14Everything so far has involved
8:17governments, state laboratories, and
8:19intelligence agencies. The next man I'm
8:22about to introduce you to changed that.
8:24The man was Abdul Kadia Khan. In the
8:27early 1970s, he was a metologist with a
8:30doctorate working a quite technical job
8:32in the Netherlands. And the company he
8:34worked for just so happened to be
8:36connected to the most sensitive secret
8:38[music] in the entire nuclear supply
8:39chain. See, to build a bomb, you need
8:42one of two materials. Plutonium, which
8:45you make in a reactor, or highly
8:47enriched uranium. And to enrich uranium,
8:49you need centrifuges, tall, delicate
8:51machines that spin at incredible speed
8:54to separate out the tiny fraction of
8:56uranium that can go into a weapon. The
8:58West had spent decades and fortunes
9:00perfecting those centrifuge designs.
9:03They were among the most closely guarded
9:05blueprints on Earth. Khan worked for a
9:07subcontractor to the European group that
9:10built them. What's interesting is that
9:12he wasn't even supposed to have those
9:14blueprints. But at one point, he was
9:16asked to help translate the classified
9:18documents for the most advanced machines
9:20they had. And for 16 days, he had
9:22unsupervised access to those designs. So
9:24when he left the Netherlands in December
9:26of 1975 to go home to Pakistan, he took
9:29copies of the centrifuge blueprints and
9:31a list of the roughly 100 companies that
9:34supplied the parts to build them. This
9:36seems like a major oversight, but Dutch
9:39intelligence had been watching him for a
9:41while. They were quite suspicious, of
9:43course, but Khan was never arrested.
9:46Years later, a former Dutch prime
9:48minister or Lubers claimed the CIA had
9:50asked the Dutch to leave him alone
9:52because they wanted to follow him and
9:54see where the trail led. How much the
9:56CIA really knew and when is still
9:58disputed. But where Khan went was
10:01Pakistan. And Pakistan wanted a bomb
10:03badly. See, in 1971, Pakistan had lost a
10:07war to India and lost half of its own
10:09country in the process when East
10:11Pakistan broke away to become
10:12Bangladesh. Then in 1974, India tested a
10:16nuclear bomb. Pakistan's leaders now had
10:19an existential crisis on their hands. So
10:21their prime minister made a promise. He
10:23said his people would eat grass. They
10:25would go hungry, but they would build a
10:27bomb of their own. Khan gave them the
10:29way to do it and China helped them
10:32finish it. Khan built a secret
10:34enrichment complex at a place called
10:36Kahuta, spending uranium on centrifuges
10:38that were direct copies of the ones he
10:40had left behind in Europe. Where China
10:42comes into the picture is the most
10:44controversial part. According to
10:46accounts, a Pakistani military plane
10:48flew out of western China carrying
10:50enough weaponsgrade uranium for two
10:52bombs and along with it a tested Chinese
10:55bomb design. A literal blueprint for a
10:58working warhead small enough to fit on a
11:00missile. By the late 1990s, Pakistan was
11:03ready. And in 1998, its neighbors gave
11:06it the perfect excuse. In May, India
11:08tested five nuclear weapons in two days.
11:11It took just 17 days before Pakistan
11:13designated five nuclear devices at once
11:16underground in the mountains of
11:17Baluchistan. 2 days later, it tested
11:19[music] another. Pakistan was now
11:22officially a nuclear power, the seventh
11:25in the world. Abdul Karia Khan was now a
11:27national hero, the father of the Islamic
11:30bomb. And he could have stopped there.
11:33He didn't. And what he did next did more
11:35to spread the bomb across the planet
11:37than any spy or war did before because
11:41Khan realized he could sell everything
11:43he knew to others, seeing as he knew the
11:45entire supply chain. So he did. The
11:48investigators who later took the network
11:50apart described it as a nuclear Walmart.
11:54Khan had a menu. At the cheap end,
11:56individual centrifuge components at a
11:58higher price bracket, complete machines,
12:00and at the top, something close to a
12:02full starter kit for a bomb program with
12:04the designs to go with it. The
12:06manufacturing was spread across the
12:08world to stay hidden. Centrifuge parts
12:10were made in Malaysia. Other components
12:12came through workshops in Turkey and
12:14suppliers in Europe. Everything funneled
12:16through the port of Dubai where it was
12:18relabeled and shipped on. His customers
12:20were exactly the kind of regimes the
12:22whole system had been built to stop. The
12:24first was Iran in the late 1980s buying
12:27the centrifuge technology that sits at
12:29the center of the Iranian nuclear crisis
12:31to this day. [music] Then North Korea.
12:33North Korea had missiles that Pakistan
12:35wanted. Pakistan through Khan had
12:37enrichment technology that North Korea
12:38wanted. So they traded missiles for
12:41centrifuges. And in 2003, North Korea
12:44walked out of the non-prololiferation
12:45treaty [music] entirely. The only
12:47country ever to do so. And it started
12:50building openly. Its first nuclear test
12:52in 2006 was so weak it may have partly
12:55failed. But they kept going. By 2017, it
12:58tested what it claimed was a
13:00thermonuclear weapon with a force that
13:02at the high end of the estimates was
13:04more than 10 times the size of the bomb
13:06that destroyed Hiroshima. So that's
13:08North Korea. But Khan wasn't done
13:10because there was one customer that
13:12eventually led to Khan being caught. And
13:14that customer was Libya. See, Libya's
13:17dictator Muhammad Gaddafi wanted the
13:20bomb, and he had plenty of oil money to
13:22pay for it. So, he bought deep into
13:24Khan's network. We're talking
13:25centrifuges, components, as well as a
13:27copy of that Chinese bomb design. China
13:30had given Pakistan back in 1982. The
13:32only problem, however, was that Libya
13:34didn't really have the scientists to
13:36make any of this work, giving Western
13:38intelligence time to infiltrate the
13:41network by reading its mail. In October
13:432003, it was finally time to make their
13:46move. a cargo ship called the BBC China
13:48was sailing from Dubai toward Libya.
13:50Intelligence agencies had diverted to a
13:52port in Italy where they opened it up
13:54inside where the five shipping
13:56containers with what was supposed to be
13:58used machine parts. They were however
14:00full of centrifuge components made in
14:02Malaysia bound for Gaddafi's bomb. This
14:05was the turning point. Faced with the
14:07evidence and with the recording of an
14:09intercepted phone call from inside his
14:11own program that Western agents played
14:13for his own officials, Gaddafi folded.
14:16And in December 2003, Libya announced it
14:19was giving up its entire weapons program
14:21and handed everything over, including
14:23the bomb design, which is how the world
14:25finally saw exactly what Khan had been
14:27selling. Now, while this was a major
14:29success, it still left one problem. Khan
14:33and Pakistan. The world knew Pakistan
14:36had been a play with Khan at the front
14:37line which wasn't a good look for
14:39Pakistan. So on the 4th of February
14:412004, Abdul Khadia Khan appeared on
14:43Pakistani national television and
14:45confessed. He said he felt the deepest
14:48sorrow and regret and took the whole
14:50blame. Almost no expert believes he
14:52hacked alone though. Running a nuclear
14:55smuggling operation for over a decade,
14:57shipping centrifuges out of a military
14:59guarded facility without the army or the
15:01intelligence service knowing is not
15:03something serious people find credible.
15:05How much senior Pakistani officials
15:07really knew remains disputed. But it
15:10didn't matter because the very next day
15:12the president of Pakistan pardoned him.
15:15He was placed under house arrest,
15:17treated gently, and Pakistan never once
15:19allowed the international inspectors or
15:21American investigators to question him
15:23directly. He was quietly released a few
15:26years later. So, was one man really
15:28responsible for arming multiple
15:30dictatorships? Well, not
15:32single-handedly. North Korea had its own
15:34reactor. Iran and Libya still needed
15:36their own scientists and their own
15:38decisions. And Khan almost certainly had
15:40his own government standing behind him.
15:43But no single person in history did more
15:45to spread the ability to build a nuclear
15:47weapon than him. And this is the moment
15:49the story changes because when a nation
15:51acquires a nuclear bomb, it is very
15:54unlikely to just give it up. Gaddafi
15:56surrendered his program and died.
15:58Ukraine surrendered its warheads and was
16:00invaded by one of the countries that
16:02promised to protect it. North Korea kept
16:05building and no foreign army has ever
16:07tried to remove its government. That
16:09does not prove nuclear weapons keep you
16:11safe, but it creates an extraordinary
16:13powerful reason to believe they do. With
16:15this lesson in mind, we can now look to
16:16the future and investigate those who are
16:18looking to acquire a nuclear weapon.
16:21Next, starting with Iran. Iran has spent
16:24decades and enormous sums building up
16:26the exact technology Khan sold.
16:28Basically, centrifuges used to enrich
16:31uranium. And it has enriched that
16:32uranium to 60% which is far beyond what
16:35any civilian power reactor needs. 60% is
16:38still below the roughly 90% you need for
16:40a weapon. But by the time you reach 60,
16:43most of the hard enrichment work is
16:45already done. And Iran is the only
16:47country in the world without nuclear
16:49weapons that has stockpiled uranium
16:51enriched to that level on this scale. By
16:53the middle of 2025, according to the
16:55national inspectors, Iran had built up a
16:57stockpile of around 440 kg of that
17:00material. In June 2025, Israel and the
17:03United States tried to end the program
17:05by force. American bombers hit Iran's
17:07main nuclear sites, including Fordo,
17:09deep under its mountain with the largest
17:12bunker busting bombs in the arsenal. The
17:14strikes did enormous damage, but
17:16destroying centrifuges and buildings is
17:18not the same as destroying the uranium.
17:20And that brings us right back to the
17:22mystery from the start of this video,
17:24because the inspectors have not been
17:25able to verify the size, the makeup, or
17:27the location of Iran's enriched uranium
17:30since the war. Maybe some was destroyed
17:33or buried under the wreckage, but we
17:35believe it was mostly moved before the
17:37bombs fell. Now, if Iran achieves
17:40nuclear capability, it could open
17:42Pandora's box because one of its biggest
17:45regional rivals is Saudi Arabia. And the
17:48Saudis may have a shortcut of a bomb of
17:51their own. For years, there have been
17:52reports that Saudi Arabia helped fund
17:54Pakistan's bomb with an understanding
17:56that if the day ever came, Pakistan
17:58would owe them a favor. essentially a
18:01ready-made bomb. Those reports have
18:03never been proven, but the two countries
18:05are unusually close. And in 2025, Saudi
18:08Arabia and nuclear armed Pakistan signed
18:11a mutual defense pact, agreeing that an
18:13attack on one would be treated as an
18:15attack on both. And this is where the
18:17whole 80year story becomes rather
18:19uncomfortable. In 1945, one country knew
18:23how to build the bomb. Four years later,
18:25there were two. then Britain, France,
18:27China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and
18:30North Korea. And almost every single
18:32time, one country getting the bomb
18:34became the reason the next one wanted
18:36it. The only question left is who is
18:39next. But that's it for this video.
18:40Thanks so much for watching and I'll see
18:42you in the next