Ukraine has the resources and expertise to indigenously produce a large quantity of nuclear weapons at short notice if it was forced to do so, a briefing document meant for top government figures allegedly says, a report states.
A briefing produced for the Ukrainian defence ministry allegedly explaining to policy makers that the country could rapidly develop rudimentary nuclear bombs from spent fuel rods and long-range ballistic missiles to carry them states this could be achieved in just months.
Claimed as an exclusive by The Times of London, the document is presented by the newspaper as illustrating a potential backstop for the country to defend itself from the Russian Federation if the United States under a Trump Presidency withdrew military support. President Trump has made clear he wishes to bring peace to Europe quickly, but has not yet revealed how. Many of the options open to him do not align with the official Kyiv policy as the only acceptable end to the war being total victory over Russia.
The paper cites key lines from the report, written for the Ukraine government’s Centre for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies by Oleksii Yizhak, a senior leader at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, also a government think tank, both of which work in an official capacity advising the Presidency of Ukraine. It allegedly notes: “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”.
Author Yikhak is stated to have reflected: “I was surprised by the reverence the United States has for Russia’s nuclear threat. It may have cost us the war… They treat nuclear weapons as some kind of God. So perhaps it is also time for us to pray to this God.”
The degree to which the briefing was solely meant for the illumination of top Ukrainian cabinet ministers — given the dissemination of key paragraphs in a widely-read English newspaper — or is partly intended as a veiled threat to both Moscow and Washington D.C., is naturally hard to immediately ascertain.
Certainly, the Ukrainian government communicated a rebuttal overnight, stating the country was bound by a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Yet this denial came without addressing the actual points in the briefing that the authors believe the country has legal grounds to unilaterally withdraw from those obligations, given it could claim other partners haven’t honoured it.
Whatever the truth, it is certain that the emergence of a new rogue nuclear state willing to use unsophisticated, low-yield nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe to defend its sovereignty from an aggressor would be not well received by Western capitals, and least of all by European nations threatened by drifting fallout clouds.
On the technical aspect of producing the devices, the report states Ukraine has access to a large quantity of spent fuel rods from its fleet of operating nuclear power plants, enough to produce “several hundred” weapons. Although this material wouldn’t be considered suitable for modern nuclear weapons by regular nuclear states, it is said to be good enough to produce a comparatively low-yield basic device.
The briefing is reported to say this would be an implosion-type, as used in the first ever nuclear explosion ‘Trinity’, and the Nagasaki bomb ‘Fat Man’, where a plutonium core surrounded by a sphere of simultaneously-ignited regular explosives compresses the material to achieve fission.
The quality of plutonium from the spent rods would make a device considerably less powerful than the Nagasaki weapon, even, but one powerful enough to one-shot an air base or town. The report allegedly stated: “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 exact nuclear yield would be unpredictable”.
As for delivery, National Institute for Strategic Studies director Valentyn Badrak is reported by The Times to have said: “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”.
1,000 kilometres is around 600 miles, and Moscow is approximately 300 miles from the closest Ukrainian territory.
As things stand, Ukraine is bound by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) which followed Budapest Memorandum, signed when Ukraine gave up its enormous stock of Soviet-era nuclear weapons following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. When Kyiv responded to the emergence of the nuclear weapon briefing on Wednesday night it was specifically to this they referred, with a government spokesman saying: “Ukraine is committed to the NPT; we do not possess, develop, or intend to acquire nuclear weapons. Ukraine works closely with the IAEA and is fully transparent to its monitoring, which rules out the use of nuclear materials for military purposes.”
Yet when Ukraine gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal from 1994, it was in return for a guarantee the United States, United Kingdom, and Russian Federation would respect its borders and not attempt to coerce the state. As stated in the new National Institute for Strategic Studies briefing, there is a clear case the treaty could be legally abandoned by its own provisions because of Russia’s invasion.
It stated: “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 is not the first time Ukraine has dangled the possibility of it becoming a nuclear state in front of the United States, and possibly as leverage to achieve its longer-term strategic goals. In September President Volodymyr Zelensky had talks with then former-President Donald Trump, laying out his position that in terms of guaranteeing Ukrainian independence into the future there were two potential paths, either NATO membership or an independent Ukrainian nuclear deterrent.
While these remarks were quickly qualified — just as with the nuclear briefing paper this week — the seed had nevertheless been sewn. Zelensky said then: “in a conversation with Donald Trump, I told him that this is how it turns out for us. What is the way out? Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and then this will be our defense, or we must have some kind of alliance. Apart from NATO, today we do not know of any active alliances”.
In October, Zelensky told European Council summit in Brussels of Ukraine’s disarmament compared to countries that kept their stocks after the Cold War: “Who gave up nuclear weapons? All of them? No. Ukraine. Who is fighting today? Ukraine… Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons and that will be our protection or we should have some sort of alliance.”
As reported in Ukrainian media last month, President Zelensky has even claimed President-elect Trump told him in response to these points that “it was a fair argument”. At that time, it was stated it could take Ukraine years to develop its own nuclear weapon, but even trying to do so would burn a great deal of goodwill with its Western backers, which are universally in favour of nuclear non-proliferation. This is to say nothing of Russia’s attitude, the aggressor, which has repeatedly threatened nuclear strikes against the West over its support for Ukraine against its invasion.
