Yesterday, London’s The Times reported in “Could Zelenskyy Use Nuclear Bombs? Ukraine’s Options Explained” that officials in Kiev believe they could quickly create a plutonium-based atomic bomb by raiding Ukraine’s nuclear energy facilities to obtain fissile material. The Times’ “exclusive” quotes from a briefing paper prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, published by a Ukrainian think tank, Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies: “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.” The nuclear devices would be minor by today’s standards but Kiev would have sufficient material “for hundreds of warheads with a tactical yield of several kilotons.”
According to the report’s author, Oleksiy Yizhak, the head of department at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies (NISS), that would be enough to “destroy an entire Russian airbase or concentrated military, industrial or logistics installations.” NISS evidently acts as an advisory body to the National Security and Defense Council within the Office of the President.
