Ukraine could quickly create a nuclear bomb if Trump stops military aid – The Times

Ukraine could potentially develop a basic nuclear bomb within a few months if U.S. military aid were to be halted following Donald Trump’s election victory.

This information reported according to an article in The Times citing a document prepared for Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense.

The report’s author, Oleksiy Yezhak, head of a department at the National Institute for Strategic Studies under the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), suggests that Ukraine could swiftly create a basic device using plutonium, similar in technology to the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.

“The creation of a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did under the Manhattan Project, would not pose a complex challenge 80 years later,” the report states.

The document notes that, without sufficient time to build and operate large facilities for uranium enrichment, Ukraine, in a wartime scenario, could instead rely on using plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods from its nuclear reactors.

“The weight of reactor-grade plutonium available to Ukraine can be estimated at seven tons… A significant arsenal of nuclear weapons would require much less material… the available material is sufficient for hundreds of tactical warheads with a few kilotons of explosive power,” the document asserts.

It adds that such a bomb would suffice to destroy a Russian airbase.

The Ministry of Defense further argues that “the breach of the memorandum by the nuclear-armed Russian Federation provides formal grounds to exit the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) and moral reasons to reconsider the non-nuclear choice made in early 1994.”

Western experts, however, believe it would take Ukraine at least five years to develop nuclear weapons and an appropriate delivery system. Meanwhile, Ukrainian expert Valentyn Badrak asserts that Ukraine could produce its own ballistic missiles in under a year.

“Within six months, Ukraine could demonstrate its capability to develop long-range ballistic missiles: we would have missiles with a range of 1,000 kilometers,” Badrak stated.

At the same time, Ukrainian nuclear technology experts argue that Ukraine would not be able to produce nuclear weapons.