Putin’s war is raising risk of another Chernobyl, says historian who inspired hit TV show

Serhii Plokhy, the celebrated Harvard historian, is the author of the definitive account not only of the genesis of the current war but also of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (for which he won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction in 2018, and which was one source for the fabulous HBO drama of the disaster the following year). His new book, Chernobyl Roulette, published with urgent timing next month, is an inside account of how nuclear power facilities have become a terrifying element of the current battlefield.

It details, with professorial care … exactly what happened after Russian forces entered the Chernobyl exclusion zone in the first week of the invasion in February 2022, trapping more than 100 workers inside the plant for nearly five weeks, until it was liberated by Ukraine.

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.”