Ukraine could develop a rudimentary nuclear bomb within months if US President-elect Donald Trump cuts off military aid. This is reported by the Times, citing a document prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
Author of the report Alexey Ezhakhead of the department of the National Institute for Strategic Studies of the National Security and Defense Council, writes that Ukraine could quickly create a basic device from plutonium with technology similar to the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
“Creating a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did with the Manhattan Project, would not be a difficult task 80 years later” – notes the report.
Lacking time to build and operate large uranium enrichment facilities, during times of war Ukraine could use plutonium from spent fuel rods recovered from Ukrainian nuclear reactors, the document emphasizes.
“The weight of reactor-grade plutonium available in Ukraine can be estimated at seven tons… A major arsenal of nuclear weapons would require much less material… the amount of material is sufficient for hundreds of warheads with a tactical yield of several kilotons ”, writes the author.
A bomb of this type would be enough to destroy a Russian air base, the report emphasizes.
“The violation of the memorandum by the nuclear-armed Russian Federation provides formal grounds for withdrawal from the NPT and moral reasons for reviewing the non-nuclear choice made in early 1994,” Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said in turn. .
According to Western experts, Ukraine will need at least five years to develop nuclear weapons and a suitable launch vehicle. However, Ukrainian expert Valentin Badrak assures that within six months Ukraine will have its own ballistic missiles.
“In six months Ukraine will be able to demonstrate that it has the capacity to create long-range ballistic missiles: we will have missiles with a range of 1,000 kilometers.” – says Badrak.
At the same time, Ukrainian nuclear technology experts claim that Ukraine will not be able to create atomic weapons, the Strana publication summarizes.
