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Ukraine can make an elementary nuclear bomb within a few months if the newly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, refuses to deliver military aid to Kiev, writes the British “Times”, referring to a “document prepared for the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine”.
It noted that the country would be able to quickly build a basic plutonium device using technology similar to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, the report said.
“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 states.
It added that without time to build and operate the large-scale facilities needed to enrich uranium, wartime Ukraine would have to rely on the use of 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 the 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 with a 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 detonated over Nagasaki, the authors of the document conclude.
– This would be enough to destroy an entire Russian airbase or concentrated military, industrial or logistics facilities. The exact strength of the nuclear charge will be unpredictable, as it will use different isotopes of plutonium – said the author of the report Aleksey Yizhak, head of the department of the National Institute for Strategic Studies of Ukraine, a state research center that acts as an advisory body to the presidential administration and the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.
Western experts believe that 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 that Ukraine will develop its own ballistic missiles in less than a year.
– In six months, Ukraine will show that it has the ability to create long-range ballistic missiles: we will have missiles with a flight range of 1,000 km – claims Badrak.
Analysts, as reported by the “Times”, say that if the US leaves Ukraine, Great Britain could fulfill the security obligations of the Budapest Memorandum, helping Ukraine to develop a nuclear deterrent, given that Kiev has no conventional means to prevent Russia from occupying Ukraine. .
Jižak stated that there is a risk that some of Ukraine’s largest cities, such as Dnipro and Kharkiv, could fall before weapons are developed.
– I was surprised by the respect that 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 to pray to that God as well – he added.
Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine never said it wanted to create nuclear weapons, “The Times” adds.
He recalled the Budapest memorandum based on which Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons, but in return, as he stated, “did not receive the promised security guarantees”.
Source: www.vesti-online.com
