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Ukraine could develop a rudimentary nuclear bomb within months ... 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.
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The paper, which is published by the Centre for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, an influential Ukrainian military think tank, has been shared with the country’s deputy defence minister and is to be presented on Wednesday at a conference likely to be attended by Ukraine’s ministers for defence and strategic industries.

It is not endorsed by the Kyiv government but sets out the legal basis under which Ukraine could withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the ratification of which was contingent on security guarantees given by the US, UK and Russia in the 1994 Budapest memorandum. The agreement stated that Ukraine would surrender its nuclear arsenal of 1,734 strategic warheads in exchange for the promise of protection.

“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,” the paper states.

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“You need to understand we face an existential challenge. If the Russians take Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians will be killed under occupation,” said Valentyn Badrak, director of the centre that produced the paper. “There are millions of us who would rather face death than go to the gulags.” Badrak is from Irpin, where occupying Russians tortured and murdered civilians, and he was hunted by troops with orders to kill him.

...Badrak insists Ukraine is less than a year from building its own 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 1,000km,” Badrak said.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer of the UK’s Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment told Times Radio that Ukraine “certainly” had the technical know-how and practical wherewithal to produce a nuclear weapon.

“Trump will take note because the last thing we want is more nuclear proliferation and any sort of nuclear strike in Europe, be it from Ukrainians or the Russians,” he added.

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Yizhak believes the threshold for developing a nuclear rearmament programme would be Putin’s troops reaching the city of Pavlohrad, a military-industrial hub about 60 miles from the present front line. Any further, and there would be a risk some of Ukraine’s largest cities, such as Dnipro and Kharkiv, could fall before the weapon was developed.

“I was surprised by the reverence the United States has for Russia’s nuclear threat. It may have cost us the war,” Yizhak said. “They treat nuclear weapons as some kind of God. So perhaps it is also time for us to pray to this God.”

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Right, let’s give nuclear weapons

... President Obama recognized Ukraine’s unique contribution to nuclear disarmament and reconfirmed that the security assurances recorded in the Budapest Memorandum with Ukraine of December 5, 1994, remain in effect. President Yanukovych announced Ukraine’s decision to get rid of all of its stocks of highly-enriched uranium by the time of the next Nuclear Security Summit ...