Now that the focus has changed (a little), I figured I’d do an infodump of something in my mind that I probably wouldn’t get to and honestly shouldn’t elaborate on in the next All Union installment. Enjoy.

In All Union’s timeline, Poland has the world’s fifth or fourth-largest nuclear arsenal.

Polish nuclear infrastructure:

• PKWU Headquarters: Warsaw
• PKWU Research Center: Krakow
• Ministry of Energy and Defense: Warsaw

Polish Material Plants:

• Chemical LEU Enrichment Plant: Gdansk
• Centrifuge HEU Enrichment Plants: Ostrowiec, Zary, Swiece
• Reprocessing Complex: Ostroda/Nowa Energia [fictional “atomgrad” by Ostroda]
• Weapon Assembly Center: Powidz
• Test Site: Opole-92

Polish Reactors:

• Commercial Plant: 3x LWR-300 (CN) reactors: Topolinek/Vistula
• Commercial Plant: 4x KR-600 (SWE) reactors: Oder-Pomerania
• Plutonium Production Reactor: 2x H-250 (PL) reactors: Nowe-Vistula

On May 20, 1992, Poland detonated a 1.1 kiloton plutonium “physics package” at the Opole Test Site. This was a rushed, improvised device of essentially no practical usability. The bomb was cobbled-together from reactor-grade plutonium taken from the Ignalina power plant in nearby, friendly Lithuania. It was intentionally fizzled to prevent the explosion from being too big, and was controversially detonated above ground to ensure the world knew. But a frenzied construction of nuclear arms and infrastructure began.

The fuel cycle starts at the processing plants. The main and largest by far is the redox chemical plant by Gdansk. The process there is inherently proliferation-resistant due to the fact that it takes a long time to make LEU, and an impossibly-long time to make weapons-level material (as in, over a decade). Low enriched uranium is taken from Gdansk and assembled into fuel rods for reactors home and abroad.

Poland in-universe has seven civilian reactors in two plants. One has three units of 300mw reactors and is located about 30 kilometers northeast of Bydgoszcz. The other has four 600mw reactors and is located near the German border slightly south of Szczecin. All are pressurized water reactors, although the Szczecin plant is of a substantially more advanced design.

However the uranium can also go into the three centrifuge collections, where it is enriched to weapons-grade levels. This makes up one half of their nuclear weapon path. Using LEU enables them to work more effectively than they could with raw uranium.

While the first proper plutonium bombs were made from “goosing” the Ignalina reactor, it was not a sustainable long-term solution. The Poles responded by building two Hanford-style graphite-pile production reactors near Nowe.

HEU and weapons-grade plutonium is taken to the highly classified Powidz assembly facilities (home to a historical/real air base) where the actual warheads are made. Every remnant is taken to the gigantic reprocessing/separation center at Ostroda, known as Nowa Energia (New Energy). There everything from MOX fuel systems for export to depleted uranium bullets are made (the Polish nuclear program makes a lot of DU, so they incorporate it into their arms industry).

For the finished products, Poland is believed to possess around two hundred warheads. It uses a dyad of aircraft/air-launched missiles and ground-based TELs. Naval deployment has been considered but is not believed to be practical as of the setting present.