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Is Ukraine preparing a nuclear bomb? The Times: If the US cuts aid, Kiev can create it within months
2024-11-13 22:15:28 / BOTA
Ukraine could produce a nuclear bomb within a few months if the newly elected president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, refuses to provide military aid to Kiev, writes the British "Times".
"The Times" referred to "a document prepared for the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine," according to which the country would be able to quickly build a basic plutonium device using technology similar to the 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," the document says.
The Times added that without time to build and operate the large facilities needed to enrich uranium, wartime Ukraine would have to rely on using plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods removed from Ukrainian nuclear reactors.
Ukraine still controls nine operational reactors and has significant nuclear experience, despite giving up the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal in 1996.
"The weight of reactor plutonium available in Ukraine can be estimated at seven tons... To create a significant arsenal of nuclear weapons, much less material is needed... The amount of material is sufficient for hundreds of warheads of tactical power of several kilotons" , the document states.
Such a bomb will have approximately one-tenth the power of the "Fat Man" bomb that the US dropped on Nagasaki, the authors of the document conclude.
"This would be enough to destroy an entire Russian air base or concentrated military, industrial or logistical facilities. The exact power of a nuclear charge will be unpredictable, as it will use different isotopes of plutonium," said the report's author, Alexey Yizhak, head of Ukraine's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a state-run think tank that acts as a advisory body to the presidential administration and the Council for National Security and Defense of Ukraine.
Western experts believe it will take at least five years for Ukraine to develop nuclear weapons and a suitable delivery vehicle, while Valentin Badrak, director of the Army Center, insists Ukraine will develop its own ballistic missiles in less than a year.
"Ukraine will show within six months that it has the ability to create long-range ballistic missiles: we will have missiles with a flight range of 1,000 km," Badrak asserted.
Analysts, quoted by the Times, say that if the US leaves Ukraine, the UK could meet its security obligations under the Budapest Memorandum by helping Ukraine develop a nuclear deterrent, given that Kiev has no conventional means of prevent Russia from invading Ukraine. Jižak stated that there is a risk that some of Ukraine's largest cities, such as Dnipro and Kharkiv, could fall before the weapons are developed.
"I was surprised by the respect the United States has for the Russian nuclear threat. Maybe it cost us the war. They treat nuclear weapons as some kind of God. Maybe it's time we pray to that God too," he added.
Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that Ukraine has never said that it wants to create nuclear weapons, adds "The Times".
He recalled the Budapest memorandum on the basis of which Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons, but in return, as he said, "did not receive the promised security guarantees."
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