Putin’s war is raising risk of another Chernobyl, says historian who inspired hit TV show
Posted: 27th August 2024
Putin’s war is raising risk of another Chernobyl, says historian who inspired hit TV show. Serhii Plokhy’s account of the 1986 disaster stunned readers and TV audiences. Now his new book warns that the threat of nuclear terror has only increased. There are, Serhii Plokhy says, not many amusing stories to come out of the war between Russia and his native Ukraine. But he couldn’t help but have the bleakest of laughs at one item of news from the last week. It was prompted by a statement from the Russian foreign ministry. Faced with the prospect of Ukrainian forces advancing across the border towards a Russian nuclear power station in Kursk, the ministry called for urgent intervention from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Given Russia’s conduct over the last two years – shelling and seizing the Ukrainian power station at Zaporizhzhia by force, and for a time occupying the contaminated site at Chernobyl with total disregard for the risks involved, the ironies were too brutal even for him. Plokhy’s book details how up until now the IAEA has been powerless in mitigating these threats – and makes the argument that “until we find out how to protect the existing nuclear power plants, we have no business at all in building new ones.” Counterintuitively he believes that the current threat in Kursk offers a small window of hope. “Now that even Russia is pointing the finger at the IAEA there is maybe an opportunity,” he says, “to look at how basically unprepared we are to deal with a nuclear crisis within a war, when facilities that were envisioned as atoms for peace become atoms for war.”
Guardian 25th Aug 2024