Could Zelensky really go nuclear and build a ‘dirty bomb’ if Trump ends US support of Ukraine?

Two years ago, as the Russian army was retreating back from northeast Ukraine, there were serious worries that Vladimir Putin would use tactical nuclear weapons to block the Ukrainian advance. In September 2022, Liz Truss is reported to have spent her last days in No 10 poring over maps of potential fallout zones affecting this country.

Although Putin has rattled his nuclear sabres several times since, he’s confined himself to launching horrific sub-nuclear thermobaric bombs amid his swarms of rockets and drones striking Ukrainian cities.

But the threat of the war turning nuclear has raised its head again – this time from Kyiv, rather than the Kremlin.

An influential think tank there has advised president Volodymyr Zelensky to use the fuel rods from Ukraine’s nuclear energy reactors to make either a Nagasaki-type Bomb or a “dirty bomb” to intimidate Russia into halting the war – and forestall the consequences of a Trump presidency cutting military and financial aid.

Although some observers pooh-pooh the idea that Ukraine would be the one to break the taboo on using nuclear weapons, don’t forget that a few weeks before Russia invaded, Zelensky warned the Munich Security Conference that his country might have to go nuclear if the West failed to prevent war.

Ever since the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986, Ukrainians have been haunted by the legacy of nuclear fallout, but maybe in desperation as the war goes badly, a last desperate gamble might make sense in Kyiv if nowhere else.

Ukrainians have long bemoaned their first post-Communist government’s decision in 1994 to transfer the Soviet-era atomic weapons from its territory to Russia. Back then, the Budapest Memorandum arranging this process was shepherded by Western states led by the USA and UK who assumed that concentrating all of the USSR’s nuclear weapons in Russia from Belarus and Kazakhstan as well as Ukraine would make the world a safer place and reduce the risk of “loose nukes” finding their way to pariah states like Saddam’s Iraq or North Korea.

A generation later, Ukraine found itself without a nuclear deterrent to Putin’s Russia while he had an atomic umbrella to deter active Western intervention when he invaded. Nato’s admiral, Rob Bauer, admitted a few days ago that if Russia did not have the bomb, the West’s troops would have actually fought the Russian army, not just provided the Ukrainians with weapons and money.

The Pentagon’s studies of tactical nuclear weapons suggest that they would have little military value unless used on a vast scale, blanketing the battlefield and a vast area around it with fallout.

Any Ukrainian nuke cobbled together in a crisis would have negligible military value, and its use on a civilian target like Moscow would outrage Kyiv’s friends – and could provoke a cataclysmic retaliation by Putin. But raising the issue could serve a rational purpose for Zelensky. It could push the Europeans and the Americans to press Russia to make peace before he goes overboard.

The nuclear talk in Kyiv is a symptom of the worsening situation on the conventional front line in the east. Rather than looking at the Nagasaki precedent at the end of the Second World War, it might be more sensible to think about November 1918. Then, the German army was ground down so badly by the Allies’ use of thousands of tanks and ever-growing numerical superiority as the Americans arrived in force in Europe, that it collapsed as a fighting force.

German intelligence has warned that Ukraine might collapse in six months leading to a flood of millions of refugees heading west. That scenario could be Putin’s non-nuclear knockout blow to Kyiv’s European allies.

Whatever Zelensky decides about the nuclear option, the fallout from the war in Ukraine looks to be heading west – no thanks to the White House.