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D-I-Y Nukes for Ukes

#1
Zinjanthropos Offline
Not a nuclear physicist but why couldn’t the Ukraine build nuclear bombs or at least a few dirty bombs? Do their nuclear power plants contain enough material to accomplish this task? Aren’t those reactors just controlled nuclear explosions?

If yes then how would that affect battlefield decisions or the odds? Could building a nuke device be as easy as searching the internet for instructions?

Would just knowing Ukraine has the capability be enough of a reason for Vlad to back off from using his own and as a result only threaten?

Didn’t the Russians take an unusual interest in Chernobyl and to some degree a power plant early in the war?
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#3
Yazata Offline
(Oct 3, 2022 11:04 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Not a nuclear physicist but why couldn’t the Ukraine build nuclear bombs or at least a few dirty bombs? Do their nuclear power plants contain enough material to accomplish this task? Aren’t those reactors just controlled nuclear explosions?

If yes then how would that affect battlefield decisions or the odds? Could building a nuke device be as easy as  searching the internet for instructions?

Would just knowing Ukraine has the capability be enough of a reason for Vlad to back off from using his own and as a result only threaten?

Didn’t the Russians take an unusual interest in Chernobyl and to some degree a power plant early in the war?

Ukraine has very good physicists and engineers. It has more nuclear power plants than most European countries, some of them probably old Soviet style plants that by all accounts produced abundant plutonium. (One of their purposes in the Soviet days.) I assume that Ukraine has nuclear waste ponds full of spent fuel rods that contain plutonium.

Of course successfully building a functioning plutonium fission weapon is reputed to be a very difficult physics and engineering problem. But if Kim Jong Un's norks can do it, I'm sure that Ukraine can.

The problem is that it would probably take several years.
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