Ukraine could develop a simple nuclear bomb within months if Donald Trump withdraws US military aid, according to a briefing paper prepared for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
The country would be able to quickly build a major plutonium device with technology similar to the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, the report said. “Creating a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did with the Manhattan Project, would not be a difficult task 80 years later,” the document says.
Since there is no time to build and operate the large facilities needed to enrich uranium, Ukraine will have to rely on the use of plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods taken from Ukrainian nuclear reactors.
Ukraine still controls nine operating reactors and has considerable experience in nuclear power, although in 1994 gave up the world's third largest nuclear arsenal. The report said: “The weight of plutonium from the reactors that Ukraine has can be estimated at seven tons... A significant arsenal of nuclear weapons would need much less material... the amount of material is sufficient for hundreds of warheads with a tactical power of several kilotons.“
Such a bomb would have about one-tenth the power of Fat Man, the paper's authors conclude.
„This would be enough to destroy an entire Russian air base or concentrated military, industrial or logistics facilities. The exact nuclear power would be unpredictable because it would use different isotopes of plutonium,” said report author Oleksiy Yizhak, head of department at Ukraine's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a government research center that acts as an advisory body to the presidency. institution and the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.
The plutonium would have to be imploded using a “sophisticated conventional explosion design, which must be carried out at high detonation wave velocity simultaneously over the entire surface of the plutonium sphere”, the report said. According to the report, the technology is difficult, but within Ukraine's experience.
Last month, President Zelensky said he told Trump that Ukraine would need nuclear weapons to ensure its country's security if it was prevented from joining NATO, as President Putin has insisted. Zelensky later said he meant there was no alternative security guarantee, and Ukrainian officials have since denied that Kiev is considering nuclear rearmament.
The document, published by the Center for the Study of the Army, Conversion and Disarmament, an influential Ukrainian military think tank, was provided to the country's deputy defense minister and will be presented on Wednesday at a conference likely to be attended by Ukrainian ministers of defense and strategic industries.
It has not been approved by the government in Kiev, but it sets out the legal basis on which Ukraine can withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), whose ratification depends on security guarantees given by the US. The United Kingdom and Russia in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. The agreement states that Ukraine will give up its nuclear arsenal of 1,734 strategic warheads in exchange for a promise of protection.
„The violation of the memorandum by the nuclear Russian Federation provides an official basis for withdrawing from the NPT and moral grounds for reconsidering the non-nuclear choice made in early 1994,”, the document states.
Russian troops are gaining momentum in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, and Trump has vowed to cut US military aid if Kiev does not agree to peace talks with Putin. Brian Lanza, an adviser to Trump, has already said that Ukraine will have to hand over Crimea. This week, Donald Trump Jr. mocked Zelensky, posting on X: “You have 38 days left until you lose your per diem”.
Ukraine's forces are heavily dependent on American weaponry, and any reduction in the flow of Western weapons into the country, let alone a complete curtailment, would have catastrophic consequences on the battlefield. This prompted the Ukrainians to look for a way to take matters into their own hands.
„You have to understand that we are facing an existential challenge. If the Russians take over Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians will be killed under the conditions of occupation,” said Valentin Badrak, director of the center that prepared the document. “There are millions of us who would rather face death than go to the gulag.“ Badrak is from Irpin, where the occupying Russians torture and kill civilians, and is pursued by soldiers with orders to kill him.
Western experts believe it will take at least five years for Ukraine to develop a nuclear weapon and a suitable delivery vehicle, but Badrak insists Ukraine is less than a year away from developing its own ballistic missiles. “After six months, Ukraine will be able to show that it has the potential for long-range ballistic missiles: we will have missiles with a range of 1,000 km,” said Badrak.
Hamish de Breton-Gordon, former commanding officer of Britain's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, told Radio Times that Ukraine “certainly“ has the technical know-how and practical means to produce a nuclear weapon.
„Trump will pay attention to this because the last thing we want is more nuclear proliferation and any nuclear strike in Europe, whether by the Ukrainians or the Russians,” he added.
Breton-Gordon called Zelensky a “master strategist” who is ready to try “absolutely anything”.
Sviatoslav Yuras, a serving Ukrainian soldier and MP, told Times Radio: “We need to focus on the means available to try to protect as many lives as possible during this ordeal.” It's pretty hard to talk about nuclear weapons right now when we have so many other weapons that we're pushing for as far as fending off persistent Russian threats.
Jizhak and Badrak argue that if the US abandons Ukraine, Britain could fulfill its security obligation under the Budapest Memorandum by helping Ukraine develop a nuclear deterrent, as it lacks conventional means to prevent Russia to conquer Ukraine.
Izhak believes that the threshold for developing a nuclear rearmament program would be for Putin's troops to reach the city of Pavlograd, a military-industrial center about 60 miles from the current front line. If it goes any further, there is a risk that some of Ukraine's largest cities, such as Dnipro and Kharkiv, will fall before the weapon is developed.
„I was surprised by the respect that the United States has for the nuclear threat from Russia. This may have cost us the war”, says Izak. “They treat nuclear weapons like some kind of God. So maybe it's time we also pray to this God.“
Ukraine's Foreign Ministry has denied it is capable of developing nuclear weapons, while stressing its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “We do not possess, do not develop and do not intend to create nuclear weapons,” said in a statement the spokesman of the ministry, Georgi Tihiy.
translation: Nick Iliev