Though realistically, because 240Pu (from waste) is worse in a fission bomb than 239Pu - generally no more than ~20kT, and challenging to get more than a few kT - still enough to take out a city centre but not a metro area - you'll generally want a fusion weapon, which means deuterium and tritium supplies. And Ukraine doesn't run CANDUs, so you're not going to get tritium from the coolant. They'd need lithium targets / lithium in the coolant to breed tritium. Separation of tritium and deuterium are a mix of chemical, electrochemical, and/or physical separation, but are much easier than uranium isotopic separation (deuterium is double the mass of protium, and tritum triple the mass, so the chemical / electrochemical behavior is actually notably different in a lot of situations, unlike uranium).

For a fusion bomb they'd also want a depleted uranium tamper, but Ukraine probably has ample access to that, whether from weapons, armour, old Soviet stocks, etc. Even spent nuclear fuel is mostly 238U, if they don't mind the tamper being highly radioactive.

My personal best guess would be that Ukraine's unstated policy is to have "sprint capacity", like Japan and South Korea do. That is, to not make weapons or anything that would get them flagged as having a weapons programme, but to have everything needed that, if the word "Go" was given, that they could nuclearize very quickly.

Unlike your typical rogue state that seeks to get nuclear weapons, Ukraine has no need for mass centrifuge facilities or anything like that. They already have plutonium en masse, as they're a major nuclear power generation state with extensive waste supplies. Plutonium extraction via PUREX is merely metallurgy (it's not a simple metal to work with, but it doesn't require isotopic enrichment). You need nitric acid (bog standard, nobody will blink an eye), a reducing agent like ferrous sulfamate (not much of a red flag, it has tons of uses), and an organic solvent like tributyl phosphate (a little bit of a red flag, but it has other uses, and there are alternatives), and a bit of gallium (~1%) for alloying - not a problem. Ukraine could very readily have all of this on-hand, an underground lab ready to go, and a rolodex of people to staff it if the order is given. They'd need high explosives like PBXs or TATB, but nobody would blink an eye at Ukraine buying them. High speed switches for the detonators used to be a big red flag item, but today they increasingly overlap with power electronics for motors and power grids. You need neutron initiators, but there's a number of options for that. And running bomb physics simulations and doing small component tests is something they could easily have under the radar - if they don't outright have old Soviet design plans dusted off and ready to go.

The biggest red flag would be Ukraine inexplicably removing nuclear waste (for processing) and/or trying to defeat IAEA monitoring, so that would likely be not done unless nuclear tensions looked severe. Because if it looks like you're sprinting to a nuclear weapon, it increases the odds of a preemptive nuclear strike against you.

LOL I've had an old Apache running for random reasons and figured it is just static content and not even TLS.

Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.

(For a full-scale exchange...)

Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.

There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.

IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.

(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).

I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake.

In an attempt to add context to what appears to be an inflammatory comment, here's some background:

Some time ago the US Department of Defense asked Musk to turn off starlink access in the Crimean peninsula. Although officially a Ukranian territory and not recognized as part of Russia, it made sense to do this due to the Russian occupation. Some Ukranian drones stopped working, and Musk steadfastly refused to allow his civilian system to be used to kill people.

Due to fallout from that incident, starlink satellite access was divided into two parts: Starlink and Starshield, both using Musk's satellites.

The explicit intent behind Starshield was to separate civilian and military uses of the satellite constellation. Under this framework:

"Starlink" is the regular user system, and it's TOS require that it not be used for military purposes. Basically, it's an ISP saying that you cannot use their system to kill people. Elon Musk is responsible for overseeing how Starlink is run and managed.

"Starshield" is the military version, and this is OK to use this as a weapon. The US Department of War (used to be "defense") controls who uses this and how it is used, they allow Ukraine to use it for battle, and they disallow Russia to use it for any purpose.

It was noticed that the Russians were stealing starlink endpoints and using them to attack Ukraine, so a "fast moving" detection was implemented to put a stop to this. As a byproduct, some Ukraine drones stopped working as well.

The Ukranians have access to starshield, the military version, and should have been using this instead of starlink.

Yes, he made the civilian version of starlink not work for drones, but this same change protected Ukraine from Russian drones using starlink.

Some people like to find reasons to criticize Musk.

This ship has already sailed. The Iranian regime has already imported criminal gangs from neighboring countries to harass and murder Iranian civilians.

The population is asking to be armed and wants to rid themselves of the murderous regime that has been brutally oppressing and murdering them for decades.

Yes you do. You blame Israel for responding to acts of war in which over a thousand civilians were intentionally targeted and massacred by a death cult whose self declared raison d'etre is explicitly and literally exterminating Jews because it is a necessary precondition for bringing about judgement day.

Hamas knew full well what would happen and the collateral damage civilians would be subjected to when Sinwar et el carried out his deliberate premeditated attacks on Israeli civilians yet they went ahead and did it anyway. They fucked around, found out and then went crying genocide to the rest of the world when the stronger power came in and kicked their teeth in.

You cherry pick the statements and actions of randos to support your prejudicial world view of all Israelis and seem to be incapable of discrimination between collateral damage and intentional targeting. Some examples of your handiwork:

"And then there are Fascist Jews such as Netanyahu, almost everyone in his government and - so it would seem - a very large portion of Israelis. They are the ones who either support or actively participate in genocide, the killing of journalists, and the beating and imprisonment of people who try to give humanitarian aid to starving, dying Palestinians.

Israeli soldiers have been documented as targeting children, even making a game of it by allocating days for shooting specific body parts: head, chest, groin, etc. Israel purposely kills international aid
workers trying to deliver food. Not to mention journalists - some of them working in other countries

I've seen video of teen-aged Israeli girls giggling as they advocate simply killing all Palestinians as though they're animals. If that doesn't indicate a societal genocide mentality, then such a thing doesn't exist. And yet, it does exist - in Israel."

To be clear: you can still totally argue about qualia, sentience, things of that nature. What is not up for debate is that they work through unimaginably-complex chains of logical reasoning on superpositions of conceptual states and engage in forward-planning and metacognition. These are just demonstrable facts.

There is no 'sentiment' in an LLM or internal state equivalent to 'thinking' anything.

Yes, there is.

Many Iranians are already fans of Israel. Democracy is a process nothing more or less. It does not guarantee that any particular policy or outcome will prevail.

LOL the US was attacked once and we invaded two countries one of which had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks leading to on order of a million direct deaths. A retaliatory 330x body count multiplier...not too shabby.

Can't even imagine what would happen in a world in which the Canadians or Mexicans lob rockets continuously into the US blowing up random shit and killing random people. Retaliation is undemocratic... collateral damage is genocide as is caring insufficiently about the plight of civilians deliberately placed in the line of fire.

Bibi is particularly evil, doesn't want two states and has attempted to subvert democracy similar to some of the shit Trump has pulled. From what I have heard under an Eisenkot most of the settlement settler bullshit would stop. Nonetheless this mental disease of constantly blaming Israel for everything is unhinged.

The regime and its proxies are considerably weaker now. They now have difficulties paying their foreign proxies to remain in Iran or their own soldiers. Disenchantment amongst the people and factions of the regime are growing.

The past is history. There does not in the present seem to be a credible path forward on nukes short of regime change.

Iran has been providing Russia with drones to kill Ukrainians for years and now in return in its hour of need Russia has done jack diddly squat to provide air defense despite having just weeks ago sent a shipment of air defense systems and fighter jets to Ethiopia. China has for years been Iran's top buyer of discount oil and yet they now openly oppose Iran's scheme to control the straight of Hormuz.

Preventing Iran from getting a nuke is a direct security benefit. Denying Iran's proxies the funding and material support to wage never revolution against out allies and destabilizing the region is a security benefit.

The Iranian regimes waging of "revolution" against the rest of the world (see Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon..etc) makes the regimes aggression everyone's business.

Yes, Clinton responded to the Srebrenica massacre with force despite a lack of credible national interest.

While opposition to oppression and massacre is of course a motive for action it may not be sufficient in and of itself. For example a lack of realistic means or costs unaligned with motives and national interests. In the case of Iran this isn't even a close call. Like a broken clock Trump is right about one thing in that Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Even the Biden administration was preparing for possible military action against Iran in a future second term due to this issue. At this point the only credible means of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuke is regime change. As a bonus regime change happens to be aligned with the interests of both the region and vast majority of the Iranian people.

The regime didn't instantly collapse so everyone should just admit defeat, give up and go home.

Retaliate with arming the Iranians.

US accidental "strategy" of bleeding the regime is already paying dividends by denying Iran's terror proxies throughout the region access to money and weapons to further fuel their chaos. They can barely even pay or feed their own military and the rial is on the brink of becoming worthless. The vast majority of the Iranian population views the oppressive murderous regime occupying Iran as illegitimate. Internal disaffection and armed opposition is only on the rise.

These structures would never have been organically possible in the first place without the curse of oil to fuel the regime externalizing its revolution against the rest of the world. If nothing else the US should just blockade the oil and let the rest take care of itself. Preferably it should provide arms and training to the Iranians and provide support for them to take back their own country... even without that things are only getting worse for the regime.

The administration is incompetent and didn't even try to build internal or external consensus for action. Lack of planning and adhoc TACO based decision making is only hurting US efforts.

Having said that it is a bit shocking to me the US managed to get players in the region on board with its iron gate / economic outcast initiatives. What is happening now with the land routes /w Pakistan, Iraq and Turkey is not something I thought would ever materialize.