Quite possibly. Pick the option and find out what I'm talking about, if you're curious.
Well, I'm officially curious enough to approval-vote for any plans that have
Well-Preserved and don't have utterly crippling penalties. It sounds like that includes more heavy industrial infrastructure than I would have believed, if "a nuclear reactor" is even remotely kinda sorta on the table.
PUREX is not
that complex -- and let's be real, radiation resistant equipment is only a priority if you care about environmental contamination and the lives and well-being of your reprocessing plant workers. If the only thing that you care about is getting devices out the door, a state that cares about it is capable of doing so.
I'm not saying that this is something that
should be done, in our situation -- IMO, this is not anywhere close to national priority, and we'd be devoting North Korea levels of resources to what is realistically a prestige project -- but North Korea
is a nuclear-capable state, and their industrial base is roughly comparable to ours.
I mean, North Korea pretty clearly has
Old World Training or something better, with equipment that, eh,
probably actually qualifies as
Old World Equipment at the very high end. They have something markedly larger than our
Green Water Navy option, and copious supplies of heavy weapons we probably can't duplicate or would struggle to duplicate including stuff like supersonic jets. They are very very
Established, they have
Rail Companies and as far as we know
Widespread Vaccinations. Their
Bureaucracy may not be
Efficient by First World standards (dunno) but they presumably have a census, taxation, and so on well and truly in place. They have
Libraries, Universities, and at least the level of infrastructure we could reasonably hope for out of
Well Preserved. And they have a population of roughly 24 million, a lot larger than ours could reasonably be.
Plus, they've had something like 100 turns of buildup time during which they've
had all this stuff and been working on their economy. Even laboring under crippling sanctions and all, that's a long list of advantages we can't match.
If they were in close proximity to us, North Korea would roll over Chicagoland
easily, even if they weren't an ultra-militarized garrison state.
I suspect North Korea wouldn't have much trouble polishing off Victoria, either, though they might have to throw a lot of bodies at it depending on how hard the 'militia'*actually fight or if they fold quickly under massed assault.
...
*(Defined by Victorians as every adult male, though they probably only mean the
sufficiently white and politically reliable adult males in practice)
The following eight are the result of me threshing them right on down to a selection of various kinds of plans. This should not be taken as sponsorship; I didn't pick these plans because I disliked the others. I was just selecting a selection of representative examples that jumped out at me. I have also added brief descriptions of the plan, for easier consumption.
