After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, independent Ukraine inherited the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, which it eventually - for its own and international security - gave up in exchange for security guarantees from the US, Great Britain and Russia. According to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Russia violated the agreement with an all-out invasion of Ukraine, while Washington and London apparently failed to guarantee Ukraine's security.

But faced with the threat that the newly elected US President Donald Trump could cut off support and financial and military aid, Ukraine, according to some estimates, has begun to think about starting a program to develop nuclear weapons.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in October, as reported by the media, gave an ultimatum to NATO, warning that his country may continue to arm itself with nuclear weapons if it does not gain NATO membership - in short, either let us into NATO or we will develop nuclear weapons. a weapon.

However, Zelensky later said he was referring to the lack of an alternative security guarantee, and Ukrainian officials have since denied that Kiev is considering re-nuclearization. Vladimir Putin, the leader of the country that was supposed to guarantee the security of its neighbor in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons, and which instead sent its military to subdue Ukraine, immediately announced that the Kremlin would never allow Ukraine to develop its own nuclear weapons.

As the Kyiv Independent recently wrote, although Kyiv does not currently possess nuclear weapons, it is not a novice when it comes to the nuclear industry. During the era of the Soviet Union, the Pivdenmash plant in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (Dnipro) produced ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Also, the Pridniprovsky chemical plant in the city of Kamyansk in the Dnipropetrovsk region processed uranium ore for the Soviet nuclear program.

Robert Kelly, an engineer with more than 35 years of experience in the US Department of Energy's nuclear weapons complex, told the Kyiv Independent that Ukraine could produce a primitive uranium fission bomb within five years.

"It's a pretty simple thing to do in the 21st century," he said. On the other hand, it would be much more difficult for Ukraine to make a plutonium fission bomb, and it would also be more difficult to hide, Kelly argued. It would take five to ten years to build a plutonium reactor, he claimed.

However, according to information published on Thursday by the British "The Times", Ukraine does not need years to develop a rudimentary bomb, but it can become a nuclear state in a matter of months, according to a report prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. The country will quickly be able to build a basic plutonium device with technology similar to the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, the report said. "Creating a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did with the Manhattan Project, would not be a difficult task 80 years later," the document said.