Whitehall,

You are hooked on the need to be efficient in fissionable materials.

The key here is political and military _realiability_, not physics package efficiency.

Implosion weapon designs require physical testing to be considered reliable weapons.

HEU, gun type, nuclear weapons designs do not.

The biggest secret and successful nuclear weapons program was South Africa’s. It made 320 kg of HEU in 10 years for $250 million. It did so using no more than 300 people at peak to build them.

All seven nuclear weapons were gun type HEU physics packages.

Since Iran has access to pre-enriched commerical nuclear fuel as a feed stock for it’s A.Q. Khan provided Pakistani nuclear separators for roughly 2 & 1/2 times as long a South Africa had a nuclear program. The working assumption that Iran has more than one gun-type HEU bomb for its Scuds is all but proven.

If Israel is really interested in survival, it should assume Iran has nuclear weapons and strike Iran with that assumption in mind.