The thing is, producing the right isotopes of uranium is mostly a linear process. It goes faster as you scale up of course, but each day a reactor produces a given amount. If you double the number of reactors you produce twice as much, etc.

There is no such equivalent for qubits or error correction. You can't say, we produce this much extra error correction per day so we will hit the target then and then.

There is also something weird in the graph in https://bas.westerbaan.name/notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html. That graph suggests that even with the best error correction in the graph, it is impossible to factor RSA-4 with less then 10^4 qubits. Which seems very odd. At the same time, Scott Aaronson wrote: "you actually can now factor 6- or 7-digit numbers with a QC". Which in the graph suggests that error rate must be very low already or quantum computers with an insane number of qubits exist.

Something doesn't add up here.

> produce at least a small nuclear explosion

The Manhattan Project scientists actually did this before anybody broke ground at Los Alamos. It was called the Chicago Pile. And if the control rods were removed and the SCRAM disabled, it absolutely would have created a "small nuclear explosion" in the middle of a major university campus.

Given the level of hype and how long it's been going on, I think it's totally reasonable for the wider world to ask the quantum crypto-breaking people to build a Chicago Pile first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1