Ukraine could develop a rudimentary nuclear weapon “within a few months” if Donald Trump decides to halt military aid to Kyiv. According to a report prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, which was disclosed by The Times on Thursday, the Eastern European country already possesses the knowledge and resources to build a rudimentary nuclear device comparable to the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
The report states that while Ukraine currently lacks the infrastructure to enrich uranium, it could instead use plutonium extracted from the spent fuel rods of its nine operational nuclear reactors.
Kyiv’s stockpiles would enable the country to create several small tactical warheads. While less destructive than the massive bombs of nuclear superpowers like Russia, they could still incapacitate critical military or logistical installations. Moreover, their exact power would be difficult to predict due to the varying isotopic compositions of the material used.
Oleksii Yizhak, head of the Department of Strategic Studies at the National Institute for Strategic Studies and author of the report, asserts that Ukraine’s sophisticated technical know-how would allow for the rapid creation of such a bomb, despite the technical challenges related to plutonium implosion.
“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,” he writes. “The weight of reactor plutonium available to Ukraine can be estimated at seven tons”, Yizhak continues, noting that “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 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 study, published by the influential Center for Army Conversion and Disarmament (CDAKR), also explores the possibility of Ukraine withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which it signed based on the security guarantees of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
“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 document reads. It refers to Ukraine’s decision to hand over all Soviet-era nuclear weapons, along with the Black Sea fleet, to Moscow in exchange for the cancellation of $2.5 billion in gas and oil debts and the supply of fuel for its civil nuclear reactors.
The prospect of returning to a nuclear deterrent was recently hinted at by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who reportedly told President-elect Trump that, in the absence of NATO protection, Kyiv might have no other option but to pursue nuclear weapons. However, Zelensky later downplayed the statement, clarifying it was merely a theoretical suggestion.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump’s advisors are considering several options to end the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as quickly as possible—an urgent priority for the new administration’s foreign policy. One of the most discussed ideas is freezing Ukraine’s NATO membership for at least twenty years in exchange for a guarantee of continued U.S. military support to prevent further Russian aggression. The proposal would also involve solidifying the current front line and creating a demilitarized zone of approximately 1,300 kilometers between Russian and Ukrainian forces, a “no-man’s land” to be monitored by those European countries that, according to Trump, have long offloaded the burden of regional security onto Washington.
Most experts believe that it would take at least five years for Ukraine to develop a fully operational nuclear capability. However, Badrak argues that Ukraine could build its first long-range ballistic missiles within six months. “You need to understand we face an existential challenge. If the Russians take Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians will be killed under occupation.”
