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Product Development is Hard - Nuclear Weapons as Case Study

Even with the plans widely disseminated, money just flung at the projects, and national prestige on the line, countries find it exceeding difficult to create their own nuclear weapons programs. This is a classic product development problem - tuning your organization to engineer a product successfully, overcoming obstacles, and managing effectively.
I don’t want to belittle the challenges involved in obtaining or creating the specialized raw materials, but as detailed below in an article by Gregg Easterbrook of the New York Times, the numbers are compelling and speak of deeper problems.
All the resources available to North Korea have been applied to weapons programs, with little results. It takes great leadership and a powerfully motivating goal to marshall the resources, intellect, brute force, and creativity necessary to overcome these challenges.
This is a clear case where it is the implementation that is the problem, not technological ambiguity.

This points to an important reality about nuclear weapons: they are extremely difficult to make. Claims that bomb plans can be downloaded from the Internet, or that fissile material is easily obtained on the black market and slapped together into an ultimate weapon, seem little more than talk-radio jabber. Nations like Libya that have made determined attempts to obtain atomic munitions have not even come close.
Atomic bombs have proved difficult for countries like Libya to make for several reasons. The “enrichment” of uranium or plutonium to weapons-grade concentrations is a fantastically complex undertaking, involving reactors that cost billions of dollars or centrifuge facilities that are also costly and complicated. Atomic bomb engineering and fabrication involve extremely precise calculations, exotic materials and unusual specialized components that even enormous cost-is-no-object government programs in the United States and the old Soviet Union found hard to manufacture.
Attempts by developing nations to make an ultimate weapon have gone slowly even though they have concentrated on atomic bombs - the kind dropped on Japan in 1945 - rather than the far more powerful thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, which have never been used, except in tests. (Making a hydrogen bomb involves even more complex calculations, precision manufacturing and rare substances, like the hydrogen isotope tritium. )

Sources: The Atomic Club: If the Bomb Is So Easy to Make, Why Don’t More Nations Have It? by Gregg Easterbrook, who typically writes for the conservative journal The New Republic. Slashdot also provides links with a good view of the history of this issue.