It is actually deviously brilliant. No one wants to shell the area because it would release all the dust and radionuclides that were buried during the cleanup.
It is a perfect staging area because the downside to attacking it is so high. No allied forces in Europe want to deal with the fallout - literally.
This is so genius I'm genuinely in awe. This is right out of Sun Tzu: “The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable. ”
Well he invented fighting, and he perfected it so that no living man could best him in the ring of honour.
Then he used his fight money to buy two of every animal on Earth, and then he herded them onto a boat, and then he beat the crap out of every single one...
Unless they're literally housed inside the containment building, this is useless against precision guided missiles and bombs. Are you talking about deterrence to nuclear bombing of Chernobyl? Then it is a moot point because the fallout from the weapon itself would dwarf the dormant fissile material in the containment facility.
Sorry, but this makes no sense. If Russia wants to deter EU with fallout, they already have such a mechanism - their massive stockpile of nuclear weapons to deter aggression by EU.
I would imagine that even a small conventional bomb landing anywhere within a few miles of Chernobyl would unearth and spread contamination.
I remember reading somewhere that all the ground was full of small radioactive particles in the area surrounding Chernobyl. So basically what they had to do was dig up the first few feet of dirt and flip it over, burying the contaminated dirt. Any small bomb would undo that. Then the wind would carry it and we'd have a whole mess.
No this doesn't have anything to do with Nuclear Weapon deterrence. Much of the liquidation effort was literally burying contaminated topsoil in the area. The explosions from conventional bombs would kick radioactive particles back up into the atmosphere. Europe probably does not want to deal with that, so I imagine they will refrain from attacking directly.
If I understand correctly, your central thesis is about deterring EU from attacking. It misses the point that Russia already has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons to deter EU from attacking them. So, why would they rely on an 'offchance' 2nd-hand threat of fallout when they can just threaten to use their guaranteed-to-deter stockpile of weapons?
I think I'm using "Allied Forces" and "Europeans" too loosely. I was lumping Ukrainian forces into that label. They're already under attack so any conventional retaliation on invading forces is already a given. I'm basically saying that NATO/EU would put pressure on Ukraine NOT to attack the staging area because any fallout could waft over into Western Europe. This is in addition to the already present downside of Ukraine re-contaminating their own backyard.
True, but the Russians are also counting on the idea that Ukrainian forces do not want to release that fallout back on to their own territory and that European forces do not want radioactive particles wafting back over into continental Europe.
Russia has calculated that while an attack would be bad for the Russian forces at Chernobyl, it would actually be much worse for the allied forces.
> True, but the Russians are also counting on the idea that Ukrainian forces do not want to release that fallout back on to their own territory
Unless there is no Ukraine. Blowing it up is the closest thing Ukraine has to a nuke and it would take out any troops stationed there. It would be a horrific thing to do though and I don't think the Ukrainian leadership has the demeanor to do it.
Russian military generally played wars with an assumed unit cost of approximately zero. They still appear to do so, despite the declining birth rate (there's a reason russian roulette is called as it is)
Chernobyl sarcophagus is a massive pile of concrete - basically indestructible. Buildings made of concrete are ridiculously resilient to explosions - remember the Beirut explosion? That grain silo right next to the epicenter was still standing
Berlin has some flak towers from WW2, quoting Wikipedia:
The Soviets, in their assault on Berlin, found it difficult to inflict significant damage on the flak towers, even with some of the largest Soviet guns, such as the 203 mm M1931 howitzers. After the war, the demolition of the towers was often considered not feasible and many remain to this day
Chernobyl's containment is not massive concrete, and cannot sustain a hit from a bomb in any way. The new safe containment structure is metal and air, it's meant to contain dust as the reactor building inside is dismantled. Watch this to learn all about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdnutU2m71o
The old sarcophagus that was build in 1986 only had concrete walls in a few key places. Much of it had huge holes and open areas covered in sheet metal. All of it was falling apart and rapidly deteriorating when construction on new safe containment started.
And remember there are 3 other reactor buildings at the site and none of them are covered by the containment structure or really any protection (Chernobyl's Soviet era design which lacks a concrete containment structure is partly why its meltdown was so catastrophic). The site cannot withstand any attack.
> Chernobyl sarcophagus is a massive pile of concrete - basically indestructible.
This is such an hilariously uneducated take that it has to be trolling.
Let's set aside the facts that the sarcophagus' 20-30 year estimated lifetime has already expired, and has previously partially collapsed, and has had to be replaced by the New Safe Confinement structure. A stray artillery shell will tear apart any 36 year old building that was structurally weakened by an explosion, concrete or not.
While the Sarcophagus and New Safe Confinement structure around the reactor contains the worst of the fallout, most of the contamination in the surrounding area was simply buried underground using bulldozers and earth-moving equipment. Explosions risk kicking up that contamination from the soil.
Yes - Chernobyl is inside the massive "Chernobyl Exclusion Zone," a zone which is conveniently only ~80 miles from the capital of Ukraine, and is just a wide swatch of empty land and abandoned buildings, perfect for parking military equipment. The radiation levels, though high compared to the rest of Ukraine, is low enough to not be a risk for their short-term stay.
Theoretically the whole area could be turned into a dirty bomb with a few strategic strikes and it would be carried down a river destroying vast areas of Ukraine for millennia.
I assume its to make sure no one in the Ukraine makes a dirty bomb, not the other way around. Revenge is a powerful motivator and Chernobyl has the raw materials to make for a horrific revenge.
It'd be easier to cover up by claiming it was an accident or they were fired on by the Ukranians. You don't really have the same leeway when you drop a nuke.
True - but Russia has nuclear weapons which are more precise and would send the strongest possible message. This is also important because destroying a country might land you a victory, but if it's destroyed, that is a shallow victory. A well-placed nuke is scary and controlled.
It's a side both EU and Russia are worried about I think.
Putin is afraid that Ukraine will somehow put together a form a nuclear bomb and use it "in desperation", and remainders in it could be used to build a dirty pseudo atom-bomb (or maybe we should call it radiation bomb).
It's also is a nice path into the Ukrain with no civilians/camera etc. around to get in their way.
One, the railhead. Afaik it’s operational and modern, as they used it for moving material for constructing the sarcophagus. Goes straight to Kiev. Makes for easy onwards transport of materiel from Belarus.
Two, a gun to the head of Europe. They could threaten to destroy the containment, and/or to bomb the reactor building to aerosolise as much radioactive material as possible.
> Two, a gun to the head of Europe. They could threaten to destroy the containment, and/or to bomb the reactor building to aerosolise as much radioactive material as possible.
If they wanted to go that extreme, they always had the option of just launching nukes. Capturing the reactor and blowing the sarcophagus just seems like a lot of needless extra steps.
Maybe I read too much scifi, but can't nukes be intercepted in key locations? They might be able to land them in more remote places, but wouldn't hitting cities be difficult? I was under the impression developed nations have missile interception technologies. But yeah, I've read books not based in reality and watched some netflix in my days, so I could be in fantasy land. Kind of sobering to write this out and realize how clueless I am.
The US and Russia long had a treaty which prohibited the development of anti-ballistic missile systems with narrow exceptions. While the treaty agreement effectively ended in 2002, it did effectively stop most ABM work in both countries for an extended period of time. Further, the problem has proven to be exceptionally difficult. The Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as "Star Wars," was an effort towards a comprehensive defense against nuclear ICBMs that was famously declared to be beyond the realm of the possible by some technical groups. While US ABM work as resumed in earnest over the last couple of decades or so, it remains an extremely hard problem and progress has been slow. The prominent GMD system, for example, has the ability to counter only "tens" of warheads (and at tremendous expense, having to fire many interceptors per inbound missile in order to raise the probability of success). Other systems like Aegis are generally even more limited.
So while various countries do possess ABM systems with varying levels of efficacy, in general we could expect only a very small portion of inbound ICBMs to be successfully intercepted... if any. These types of systems have consistently under-performed expectations as field conditions prove to be more challenging than expected, and that's with limited knowledge of the countermeasures an adversary like Russia might employ.
Aside from the numbers game, ICBMs used to be the fastest way to deliver a warhead, with the obvious drawback that anyone watching the horizon can see it coming from half a world away.
Nuclear warheads have been further miniaturized since the cold war, it is now possible to fit them into cruise missiles.
> The deployment of Kalibr missiles, long-range, low-flying, capable of carrying conventional or nuclear warheads, available in land-attack, anti-ship and anti-submarine variants, was said to have altered the military balance in Europe and potentially compromised the NATO missile defence system under construction in Europe. [0]
There's also the rumored/propagandized hypersonic, nuclear powered cruise missiles (skyfall [1]) that are meant to defeat missile defense and circumvent MAD by enabling undetected first strike.
Plausible deniability is a good reason not to use nukes. They could have a military accident, or blame a saboteur for some sort of weapons cache exploding in-situ and claim it was not intentional.
> Two, a gun to the head of Europe. They could threaten to destroy the containment, and/or to bomb the reactor building to aerosolise as much radioactive material as possible.
Does the wind only blow west? This seems pretty far fetched.
Does Putin care, he will just say the West or Ukraine did so to hinder Russia and then use the damage to Russia as an excuse to act even more ruthless.
I don't think the second is realistic, as that might be considered an attack on NATO countries, which is likely not a scale of war Russia is looking for.
Nuking someone is a definitive, MAD-triggering event. Causing a radiological disaster "accidentally" would be entirely consistent with the "stop hitting yourself" diplomacy Russia has undertaken since moving against Ukraine in 2014.
They won't blow up Chernobyl. Ukraine is a top grain exporting nation. Without wheat, Ukraine's economy would be even worse and there would be no way to feed the people.
