Ukraine has enough plutonium to construct hundreds of nuclear warheads for rudimentary bombs akin to the first atomic weapons dropped on Japan by the US in 1945, a new report has revealed.
A briefing paper prepared for Ukraine's Defence Ministry said Kyiv could develop small dirty bombs within months if Donald Trump pulls US military aid.
Despite giving up its nuclear arsenal in 1996, Kyiv is still in control of nine operational reactors and has significant expertise on how to build the weapons.
Ukraine does not have the time or resources to run the facilities required to enrich uranium needed for high-yield nuclear weapons amid the ongoing war.
But Oleksii Yizhak, head of department at Ukraine's National Institute for Strategic Studies and author of the paper, said Kyiv could extract plutonium from its spent fuel rods at nuclear power plants to create a significant arsenal of dirty warheads.
'The amount of material is sufficient for hundreds of warheads with a tactical yield of several kilotons,' Yizhak concluded.
'That would be enough to destroy an entire Russian airbase or concentrated military, industrial or logistics installations.'
The weapon would use similar technology to the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, the report stated, with each bomb having roughly one tenth of the power of the Fat Man.
The concerning revelation comes after Trump reportedly backed the shock ultimatum President Volodymyr Zelensky gave NATO last month in which he suggested Ukraine would need to become a nuclear power if it is not granted a NATO membership.
Zelensky later clarified he had meant there was no alternative security guarantee and Kyiv has since denied they are considering building a nuclear bomb.
According to The Times, the briefing paper prepared for the Ministry of Defence reads: '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 weight of reactor plutonium available to Ukraine can be estimated at seven tons… A significant nuclear weapons arsenal would require much less material,' it continued.
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