Fire breaks out at site of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, March 3, 2022

Of all the wild and crazy ideas for ending Russia’s war on Ukraine that I’ve seen floated, none is stupider this one from tech VC Jason Calacanis: “If we want to stop Russia immediately, every western country should pass binding, emergency legislation to build an additional 10 new nuclear plants in the next decade. 100–200 new nuclear power plants would collapse the Russia economy *permanently*. Done.”

He tweeted that two days ago, a day after Russian forces shelled and then seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has six Russian-designed reactors. It’s stupid not only because Calacanis imagines that Vladimir Putin might be stopped in his tracks by the passage of legislation, and not only because he thinks permanently collapsing Russia’s economy would be a good thing (after all, the near-collapse of the Russian economy in the 1990s helped fuel Putin’s rise to power). If the point of building more nuclear power plants is to reduce Western dependence on Russian oil and gas, we can do that now with emergency legislation building more solar and wind energy farms, which can come online in a matter of months rather than the 5–6 years it takes to build a nuke.

There’s a bigger reason why Calacanis — who, to be fair, clearly wants to see Russia defeated — is wrong. We are now getting an object lesson is why nuclear power is such a risky form of energy to rely on. It requires a level of political stability that the world, so far at least, can’t guarantee. In peacetime, there is always some risk a nuclear power plant could have an accident (Three Mile Island, 1979); or be poorly designed and managed (Chernobyl, 1986); or be hit by an earthquake and tsunami (Fukashima, 2011). But in wartime, every civilian nuke is a huge target.

And it’s not just Chernobyl, the most infamous of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities, which Russia seized on the opening days of the war, and which stands directly in the path to Kyiv, Ukraine’s embattled capital. Last Friday night, the world held its breath as the lights at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power complex flickered. More than 75,000 people watched a YouTube livestream from the plant grounds as a building burned from Russian shelling. Some fans of nuclear power claimed that our fears were overblown, since the building on fire was not one of the six reactors at Zaporizhzhia. But had the Russian attack shut down the plant’s electricity or damaged its water pumps, a meltdown could have been the result. And if Russian shells hit the pools where spent fuel rods are stored on site, the radiation released could have also killed or harmed many people. A briefing paper put out by Greenpeace just days before the attack on Zaporizhzhia noted that there could be more than 2,200 tons of spent fuel on the site, with nearly half still “hot” and sitting in cooling pools. It is also unclear, according to that paper, whether the back-up diesel generators at Zaporizhzhia are reliable. Under to the Geneva Convention, nuclear power plants are considered “installations containing dangerous forces” and should never be attacked. But that means little if the attacker doesn’t care about international law.

Ukrainian civilians from a village near Zaporizhzhia trying to block the Russian assault last week

As the war continues without Russia managing to “decapitate” the Zelenskyy government or blitzkrieg its way through Ukraine’s defenses, we have every reason to worry that Putin may decide to “escalate to de-escalate” by using a low-yield nuclear weapon to stun the Ukrainians into surrendering, something I wrote about here last week (see “Time to Start Worrying About the Bomb (Again)”). Joe Cirincione, a longtime arms control expert, shared this concern yesterday. “Would Putin use a nuclear weapon first in the Ukraine War? Maybe. Right now the risk is low, but it is not zero,” he tweeted. “The risk that Putin would use these weapons actually increases if he feels he is losing the war. It is not clear, but many analysts — I am one — believe they have a strategy to use a nuclear weapon first if they believe the state is threatened.”

By focusing on Russia’s stated military doctrine and the low-yield nuclear weapons in his armory, we may be making a major conceptual mistake. Putin has another way of “using” a “nuclear weapon” in Ukraine if he wants to escalate the terror he is imposing on its people and maybe topple its government. He can cause a nuclear accident. Even more, he can try to make it look like the Ukrainians were at fault.

How else to interpret this news story put out by TASS, the official Russian news agency, earlier today?

“The Ukrainian Security Forces and the nationalist Azov battalion are planning to blow up a reactor at the National Research Center of the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology and accuse the Russian Armed Forces of launching projectiles at an experimental nuclear reactor, says Russia’s Defense Ministry on Monday.

“The Security Forces of Ukraine along with the militants of the Azov battalion are plotting a provocation with possible radioactive contamination of the area near the city of Kharkov. Nationalists mined a reactor at an experimental nuclear system located at the [National Research Center of] Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology. The Ukrainian military and the Azov battalion militants are planning to blow up the reactor and accuse the Russian Armed Forces of allegedly launching a missile strike on an experimental nuclear system.”

In addition to causing a nuclear accident and then trying to pin it on Ukraine, it’s possible Putin has chosen to seize the country’s nuclear power plants to build a pretext for claiming that it was secretly building its own nuclear weapons program. That was one of the spurious threats to Russia’s national security that Putin cited in a speech he made just before invading. Consider this snippet from a long Facebook post from what appears to be an officer of Russia’s FSB (the continuation of the old KGB) officer venting his frustrations with Putin’s whole war.

He writes, according to this translation posted on Pastebin, “Is there a possibility of a local nuclear strike? Yes. Not for military purposes (it will not give anything — this is a defense breakthrough weapon), but with the aim of intimidating others. At the same time, the soil is being prepared to turn everything to Ukraine — [Sergey] Naryshkin and his SVR [Russian’s foreign intelligence service] are now digging the earth to prove that they secretly created nuclear weapons there. Damn, they are now hammering on what we have long studied and dismantled: you can’t draw evidence here on your knee, and the presence of specialists and uranium (Ukraine has a lot of depleted isotope 238) is nothing. There the production cycle is such that you can’t do it imperceptibly. You can’t even make a “dirty” bomb imperceptibly, but the fact that their old nuclear power plants can produce weapons-grade plutonium (plants like REB-1000 produce it in minimal quantities as a “by-product” of the reaction) — so the Americans introduced such control there with the involvement of the IAEA, that sucking on the topic is stupid.”

It may be stupid, and no one outside of Russia may believe whatever story is offered to explain it (something the Ukraine Crisis Media Center is warning about), but Putin is clearly playing with nuclear fire in more ways than one.

As I wrote last week, we are in the middle of the loudest wake-up call possible. The proliferation of nuclear weapons, and their supposedly peaceful civilian cousin, nuclear power, is too dangerous for us to ignore. Don’t take it from me, listen to Joan Rohlfing, president and chief operating officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. “I am deeply concerned we have arrived at the most dangerous moment in our collective nuclear history since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” she told Newsweek. A generation ago, organizers built a transnational movement that successfully pressured the US and the USSR to step back from the brink. Now, as the United States and Russia inch closer to a nuclear confrontation, we have no choice now but to do it again.