How can we even be sure such a weapon exists or can exist if we can’t review the workings of it?
This whole “it’s for your own safety, let us protect you with it, trust us (no you can’t read it)” is not informed consent and no amount of mental gymnastics will make it informed consent.
The government requires the consent of the governed or it is illegitimate. Secrets preclude informed consent. There is nothing special or unique about the humans in the government that entitle them to access to secrets whilst denying the governed that same access.
We know that nuclear weapons exist, but generally you can't find plans on how to make the kinds we produce that yield much larger degrees of damage. So, I'm not sure what your point is. We also know that an F-35 and F-22 exist...but we have no idea what the schematics are, we don't even know what it's coated with, they are secret.
That's not true. Nuclear weapons are a 1940's technology, a fat-boy gun style device is simple enough and can be quite powerful. The only thing that's stopping everyone from producing their own is that refining uranium requires a massive amount of energy and scale. Delivery of warheads is the main problem though. What needs to be secret is the delivery / strategy part.
The technology is old, and the theory is open knowledge...it is not well documented or public on how to actually build a working bomb. Especially thermonuclear bombs. There is a reason North Korea struggles to provision a working bomb when it has all the materials in place. The reason Israel got the bomb is because France shared the information with them. Not everyone has that information.
Then again, I think all known practical methods of setting off a fusion bomb involve using a fission bomb to do so, so the barrier to entry for even experimentation/development is extremely high.
Lol, how to actually build it is the easy part. Again, the hard part is the refining uranium to get Uranium-235 and that's (thankfully) mostly a highly resource intensive job with large scale industry needed.
Note that we are talking about 1940's "fat boy" here.
Also, note that the fact that the poorest nation on Earth can do this today kinda says everything.
I think this is one of the things that we should be alarmed at, at how easy it is to make nuclear weapons in today's age. Putting your head in the sand and refusing to accept reality is dangerous.
This whole “it’s for your own safety, let us protect you with it, trust us (no you can’t read it)” is not informed consent and no amount of mental gymnastics will make it informed consent.
The government requires the consent of the governed or it is illegitimate. Secrets preclude informed consent. There is nothing special or unique about the humans in the government that entitle them to access to secrets whilst denying the governed that same access.