Ukraine could develop a rudimentary nuclear bomb within months if Donald Trump withdraws US military assistance, according to a briefing paper prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.
The country would quickly be able to build a basic device from plutonium with a similar technology to the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, the report states. “Creating a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did within the framework of the Manhattan Project, would not be a difficult task 80 years later,” the document reads.
With no time to build and run the large facilities required 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 having given up the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal in 1996. The report says: “The weight of reactor plutonium 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 one tenth the power of Fat Man, the document’s authors conclude.
“That would be enough to destroy an entire Russian airbase or concentrated military, industrial or logistics installations. The exact nuclear yield would be unpredictable because it would use different isotopes of plutonium,” said the report’s author, Oleksii Yizhak, head of department at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, a government research centre that acts as an advisory body to the presidential office and the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine.
The plutonium would need to be imploded using “a complicated conventional explosion design, which must occur with a high detonation wave velocity simultaneously around the entire surface of the plutonium sphere,” the report reads. The technology is challenging but within Ukraine’s expertise, according to the briefing.
