Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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They could do it, but the description (what I can see of it before the paywall) undersells the difficulty. You can't just reprocess "spent" fuel and get weapons-grade plutonium; you get plutonium, but too much of it is 240Pu and 242Pu, which cause predetonation, and your bomb fizzles. You need "fresh" fuel that's only been in the reactor a few weeks. You also need a reprocessing plant; it appears Ukraine doesn't have one, and it's not like Zelensky can go to Western Europe and say "here's some fuel, please extract the weapons-grade plutonium and give it back to me" (the NPT specifically prohibits doing that, not that they would anyway), so they'd have to build one; "months" would be an optimistic estimate there (on the plus side for them, they can put in fresh fuel for weapons production right away, so there's no extra time lag from that), particularly since if the Russians notice such a plant being constructed it's going to eat All Of The Missiles.
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