Russia has put Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in the cross hairs of combat, but it was not the first nation to attack an operational reactor in war. That was the United States three decades ago. The American strike on an Iraqi site is part of a little-known history in which foreign attackers have fired more than a dozen times on nuclear plants not only in Iraq but Iran, Israel and Syria. Their attacks sought to end atomic bomb programs.
Analysts divide the 42-year history into intensifying stages. The dangers soared in March when Russian troops attacked the six reactors at the Zaporizhzhia power plant in Ukraine and seized control of the giant complex. Its capture, and the ongoing fighting at the site, have set off global alarms over the possibility of catastrophic damage and deadly plumes of radioactive fallout.
Russia’s siege of the Zaporizhzhia site is without precedent in the history of warfare, with an invading power aiming to extract economic leverage over a highly complex power generation plant. But experts say that knowledge of the earlier strikes on nuclear reactors, and the missed opportunities to create a global prohibition on attacking such sites, can help policymakers and the public better understand the rising dangers and ways to limit them.
“History underscores the urgency,” said Bennett Ramberg, a former State Department analyst and author of a 1984 book on the vulnerability of reactors in war. “The scale of the current threat demands a renewed effort by the international community” to establish legal prohibitions on striking reactors during military conflict, as well as new physical protections for the atomic plants.
In Kyiv on Thursday, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency spoke with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine about establishing a no-combat zone around the beleaguered nuclear plant. The agency has for decades discussed the possibility of creating a legal basis for such protective zones and is now seeking an ad hoc agreement in war-torn Ukraine. “There is a need for urgent action,” Rafael M. Grossi, the agency’s head, said in a statement. On Friday, four agency experts arrived at the Ukrainian plant to help assess the combat dangers and establish a protective zone if Russia and Ukraine can strike a deal.
Nuclear reactors can destroy cities or light them. Their importance in a war lies in their uranium fuel, which can be diverted into atomic bomb programs.
That was the rationale for historical attacks on nuclear sites: destroying or disrupting bomb programs. Combatants in the Middle East focused their fury especially on the atomic strides of Iraq’s brutal leader, Saddam Hussein, who rose to power in the 1970s and sought to redraw the map of the Middle East. In a 1975 interview, Mr. Hussein called a nuclear reactor purchase “the first Arab step toward gaining nuclear arms.”
In September 1980, two Iranian jets flew into Iraq, dropped low to avoid radar detection and raced into position over Al Tuwaitha, an industrial fortress south of Baghdad on the banks of the Tigris River. Their target was the Osirak nuclear reactor, then under construction and unfueled. Bombs fell. It was the world’s first military attack on a nuclear reactor.
Nine months later, in June 1981, eight Israeli jets dropped their own one-ton bombs on the same reactor, greatly increasing the degree of destruction.
Furious, the Iraqi leader sought revenge — but only on Iran. Beginning in 1984, he sent waves of Iraqi jets to destroy two half-built, unfueled nuclear reactors at Bushehr, an Iranian port city on the Persian Gulf. The reactors were Iran’s first venture into nuclear power. In all, Iraqi warplanes flew seven bombing runs. One reactor was eventually rebuilt by Russia, switched on and guarded by antiaircraft guns.
Diplomats were appalled. In 1985, the general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency called for “binding international rules prohibiting armed attacks.” Washington objected.
Mr. Ramberg, the former State Department analyst, said the United States had resisted because it wanted a legal right to bomb reactors. “We want to retain this option,” he said.
The United States exercised that option in January 1991 during the opening hours of the Gulf War. The targets were two reactors at the Tuwaitha complex. Both assemblages were described as operational, meaning they had been fueled.
Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it a crippling blow against the threat of an Iraqi atomic bomb. “The two operating reactors they had are both gone,” he told reporters at a Pentagon news briefing. “They’re down. They’re finished.”
Days later, Paul Leventhal, director of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington, called the strikes on operating reactors a dangerous precedent and wondered if the nation’s foes might seek retaliation. A related question, he added, is how well protected “our reactors are against such an attack.”
When retribution came, it targeted not the United States but Israel, which had applauded the allied bombings. During the 1991 war, Iraq fired waves of scud missiles at its neighbor, including five at the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert, the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program.
But the Iraqi missiles missed their target and instead slammed into the desert. If successful, they would have represented the world’s second attack on an operational reactor site.
A decade later, Mr. Leventhal’s concern about enemy strikes on American reactors took a scary turn. It began Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked passenger jets and smashed them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York. A commission that investigated the attacks found evidence that the plotters had initially considered strikes on nuclear power plants.
That was a new idea. The aim of the terrorists was not to keep reactors from making bomb fuel but to spread their peaceful byproducts far and wide — to breech a reactor’s protective cocoon, cause fuel meltdowns and release clouds of deadly radiation into the environment.
“If you get hit near a populated area, you’re talking about huge evacuations and salting the earth for 20 or 30 years,” said Henry D. Sokolski, a nuclear policy official in the Defense Department from 1989 to 1993 who now studies and writes about threats to the reactors.
The scare prompted years of reports and actions meant to expand reactor protections. Armed teams practiced security drills. In the end, however, the federal overseers of the nation’s power reactors rejected calls to harden nuclear plants against jetliner strikes.
“The industry fought tooth and nail to limit those protections,” said Edwin Lyman, a nuclear power expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass.
Amid the American debate, Israeli warplanes struck again in the Middle East. In 2007, they bombed a site in Syria that concealed a partly built nuclear reactor meant to make bomb fuel.
Analysts see the recent dramatic escalation in the reactor saga — Russia’s shelling and takeover of the Zaporizhzhia complex in Ukraine early this year — as representing a surprising new turn. The goal is not destroying Ukraine’s power plants, but energy theft.
The action has no precedent. Analysts say a working nuclear power plant has never before been taken as a spoil of war or kept operating at gunpoint. The International Atomic Energy Agency, in a report issued last month, used the word “unprecedented” five times in describing the tense situation.
On Sept. 19, Russia widened its reign of atomic terror when one of its missiles struck the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant, 160 miles west of Zaporizhzhia. The powerful blast shattered windows and damaged buildings but left the plant’s three reactors intact.
The attack “all too clearly demonstrates the potential dangers” for Ukraine’s other plants, Mr. Grossi, head of the energy agency, said in a statement that day.
Jeffrey S. Merrifield, a commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission between 1998 and 2007, said in an interview that Moscow was seeking to extract a geopolitical edge from the stolen atomic energy. “They clearly want economic leverage,” he said of Russian officials. “It’s a horrible precedent.”
Mr. Ramberg, the former State Department analyst, said he hoped the escalation in atomic horror would prompt the United States to rethink its reactor-attack policy and back a renewed global effort to shield power reactors from the ravages and uncertainties of war.
“Its time has come,” he said of new protections. “There’s no justification to bomb a nuclear power plant. The U.S. should establish this as a standard for the world.”
