According to a briefing paper prepared by a leading Ukrainian think tank for the country’s Ministry of Defense, Ukraine has the capability to rapidly develop simple nuclear weapons as a last resort in case President Trump significantly cuts back on U.S. military assistance. The document was obtained by The Times, which published its findings on Thursday, November 14th.
The author of the report argues that the simplest and quickest way to build a nuclear weapon would be to follow the blueprint for “Fat Man,” the larger of the two nuclear bombs America used against Japan. “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, explaining that the technology and the know-how are readily available.
With no time to build uranium-enrichment facilities, however, Ukraine could instead rely on extracting plutonium from spent fuel rods from its nine operational nuclear reactors. There is enough plutonium in the country to build a full arsenal, the author says, and even if the lack of uranium means these bombs would have ten times smaller yield than the Fat Man, that is still enough to achieve strategic goals.
The report explains:
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.
That would be enough to destroy an entire Russian airbase or concentrated military, industrial, or logistics installations.
The document was written by Oleksii Yizhak, department head at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, a government research center acting as an advisory body to the president and the National Security Council. It was shared with senior security officials and will be presented to the ministers of defense and strategic industries next Wednesday, according to the journal.
The Times does not say whether the paper also talks about a possible escalation that might follow if Kyiv decides to develop or even use strategic nukes on the battlefield.
It does, however, provide legal justification for such a move, arguing that since Moscow violated the 1994 Budapest memorandum by attacking Ukraine, Kyiv has no longer any obligation under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1991.
“The violation of the memorandum by the nuclear-armed Russian Federation provides formal grounds for withdrawal from the NPT and moral reasons for reconsideration of the non-nuclear choice made in early 1994,” it says.
From the Ukrainian standpoint, it seems it is no longer relevant if the conflict evolves into a regional or a world war. “You need to understand we face an existential challenge. … There are millions of us who would rather face death than go to the gulags,” said Valentyn Badrak, the director of the Ukrainian Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, the think tank that produced the report.
While outside experts believe Ukraine would need up to five years to develop a nuclear bomb and a suitable carrier, Badrak says the country is actually within months of having its nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. “In six months Ukraine will be able to show that it has a long-range ballistic missile capability: we will have missiles with a range of 1,000 km,” he said.
At the same time, no official endorsement of this plan came from the Ukrainian government, which repeatedly stressed that it never planned to develop a nuclear arsenal of its own. “We do not possess, do not develop, and do not intend to create nuclear weapons,” Heorhiy Tykhy, a spokesman for the MoD said in a recent statement.
