Ukraine may develop a nuclear bomb within months

Ukraine could develop a nuclear bomb within months if US President-elect Donald Trump cuts US military aid, according to a document prepared for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.

The country could quickly build a basic plutonium device with technology similar to the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, the document says. “Creating a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did with the Manhattan Project, will not be a difficult task 80 years later.”

Without time to build and operate the large facilities needed to enrich uranium, wartime Ukraine would have to rely instead on using plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods taken from Ukraine’s nuclear reactors.

Ukraine still controls nine operational reactors and has significant nuclear expertise despite giving up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in 1996.

The document reads: “The weight of plutonium in the reactor available to Ukraine can be estimated at seven tons… A significant nuclear weapons arsenal would require much less material… The amount of material is sufficient for hundreds of warheads with a tactical yield of several kilotons.”

Such a bomb would have about a tenth of the power of the “fat man”, the authors of the document conclude.

“It would be enough to destroy an entire Russian air base or concentrated military, industrial or logistical facilities. The exact nuclear yield will be unpredictable because it will use different isotopes of plutonium,” said the author of the document, Oleksiy Yitzhak, head of the department at the National Institute for Strategic Studies of Ukraine, Center A government study that serves as an advisory body to the Office of the President and the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.

The plutonium would have to be detonated using a “complicated conventional detonation design, which must occur at high blast wave velocity simultaneously around the entire surface of the plutonium ball,” it added. The technology is challenging but in Ukraine’s area of ​​expertise, it was noted.

The article, published by the Center for Military Studies, Conversion and Disarmament, an influential Ukrainian military think tank, was shared with the country’s deputy defense minister and presented today at a conference attended by Ukraine’s ministers of defense and strategic industries.

Last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he told Trump that Ukraine would need nuclear weapons to ensure its security if he was prevented from joining NATO, as Russian President Vladimir Putin had demanded. Zelensky later said he meant there was no alternative security guarantee, and Ukrainian officials have since denied that Kiev is considering nuclear armament.