MOSCOW, April 8. /TASS/. The European Union has started to secretly explore ways to create its own nuclear weapons production capabilities, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said in a statement.
"Secret work has begun in the endless corridors of the EU headquarters to study ways to create their own nuclear weapons production capabilities, with EU officials naturally claiming that the sole goal is to deter the imaginary Russian threat. It seems [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen and her accomplices consider the role of warmongers in the Ukraine conflict to be too unassuming. They must be dreaming of the evil glory of Nazi Germany’s leaders that unleashed World War II," the statement reads.
"The leaders of the EU and several of its leading member states have reached the bottom of their madness and political irresponsibility rooted in abnormal hatred of Russia. According to the information obtained by the SVR, this time, the Brussels-led EU has embarked on a dangerous path of inevitably undermining the global security architecture and the international system for the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in order to implement their plan for another ‘eastern campaign’," the SVR emphasized.
According to the intelligence agency, von der Leyen and Co. first agreed "to make sure that these preparations take place as secretly as possible." "To distract the international and European public, Brussels keeps demonstrating commitment to its traditional policy of relying on the US ‘nuclear umbrella.’ The EU leadership expects that such an attitude will buy it time to covertly establish its own nuclear weapons capacities and prepare the public for a political decision to acquire nuclear weapons," the statement adds.
"In the meantime, the UK and France will continue to increasingly coordinate their national nuclear doctrines. A pan-European doctrine of nuclear deterrence is expected to be formalized later. It will be based on the French and British military capabilities, as well as on financial and infrastructure-related contributions by the EU countries that don’t possess nuclear weapons. Moreover, the EU will reserve the opportunity to set up a completely independent nuclear forces command," the SVR pointed out.
Potential timeline
According to the SVR, the EU’s plans "have a strong industrial and technical foundation." "Notably, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain already have key expertise in creating certain components of nuclear weapons," the agency said. "These countries have civilian and military industrial capacities to produce nuclear weapons components. They store large amounts of irradiated nuclear fuel from decommissioned nuclear power units. It can be taken out of storage sites covertly in order to extract plutonium suitable for making an atomic bomb."
Meanwhile, German experts "are capable of secretly acquiring enough weapons-grade plutonium in the fuel chambers of research laboratories in Karlsruhe, Dresden, Erlangen and Julich within about a month to make one nuclear explosive device, while it will take them just a week to obtain weapons-grade uranium at the enrichment facility in Gronau."
"We would like to draw the attention of the US administration and the leaders of all other countries to the need to make everything possible to prevent the EU from creating its own nuclear weapons as it would inevitably lead to a new round of the nuclear arms race," Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service concluded.