A government research center has claimed that the country has enough plutonium to build hundreds of crude warheads.

Ukraine could feasibly raid the country's nuclear reactors to develop crude atomic weapons if the US cuts off military aid, a briefing paper prepared for the Ministry of Defense has advised.

The Times reported on Wednesday that its authors at the National Institute for Strategic Studies believe "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 report was published by the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies.

While Ukraine cannot enrich Uranium - a process vital for building modern nuclear weapons, its nine operating nuclear reactors contain an estimated seven tons of plutonium, its authors claimed. This could be used to build bombs similar to the 'Fat Man' device dropped on Nagasaki by the US in 1945.

While a Ukrainian 'Fat Man' would only be a tenth as powerful as the device that leveled Nagasaki, author Aleksey Yizhak explained:

"The amount of plutonium in the country's reactors 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 exact nuclear yield would be unpredictable because it would use different isotopes of plutonium."

Excerpts from the paper were published by The Times on Wednesday. According to the British newspaper, the report has been shared with Ukraine's deputy defense minister, and will be presented at a conference attended by the country's defense and strategic industries ministers on Wednesday.

Russia's nuclear doctrine allows for the use of such weapons in the event of a first nuclear strike on its territory or infrastructure, or if the existence of the Russian state is threatened by either nuclear or conventional weapons. Earlier this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Moscow should have the right to consider the nuclear option if it is attacked by a non-nuclear state that is backed by one that possesses such weaponry.

The threat of Russian nuclear retaliation has prevented NATO from intervening directly in the Ukraine conflict, the outgoing chief of the bloc's military committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, said at a summit on Sunday.

Speaking to The Times, Yizhak downplayed the threat of nuclear war:

"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."

Last month, Zelensky declared that Ukraine would attempt to acquire nuclear weapons if it is denied NATO membership, although he later walked these comments back. "Russia will not allow this to happen, no matter what," Putin said in response.

In a statement on Thursday, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Georgy Tikhy said that Kiev was "not developing and not seeking to develop nuclear weapons."
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