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 policymakers 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.
