Ukraine Nuclear Doomsday Scenario

By: Andrew_McKillop

No Pleasure To Write This Article
For almost sure but not certainly, if there's a nuance of difference between them, I will be accused of sowing dangerous and seditious ideas, but I have already published on this theme and I am not talking about fantasies – but facts. Removed from the arena of constantly rising western sanctions against Russia and Russian counter-sanctions against the west, the Ukraine civil war goes on.

Most estimates place the death toll to date, early August, at about 1500 with several thousand injured and possibly 600 000 refugees from war.  To be sure this is outdistanced and outrun by Israel's gory antics in Gaza and the gory antics of ISIS in Iraq. Call this “asymmetric war” because it is.

Zbigniew Brzezinski has already licked his lips in public and in print on the potential for goading Russia to invade eastern Ukraine, and then hit the Red Army with a “Grozny-type” asymmetric urban war of attrition on a city-by-city basis. With huge civilian casualties, of course.”Zbig” doesn't talk about that detail, of course.

Already in April, Kiev Right Sector thugs descended on the Zaporizhzhya 6-reactor complex in eastern Ukraine “to serve a lesson” to pro-Russian separatists. They were fortunately thrown out soon after.

Source: James Heddle, 'The Ukrainian Nuclear Threat Updated', 6 May 2014
http://www.planetarianperspectives.net/?p=1474

Zbig Is Ignorant But Not Innocent
There is no such thing as innocence about the dangers of nuclear power and weapons, especially in a country like the USA that has been using civil nuclear power for 60 years, since 1954, and posseses (and uses) fully functional nuclear weapons since 1945. .To remind us all about the dangers of civil nuclear power the Ukraine Chornobyl disaster of 1986 and the Japan's Fukushima disaster of 2011 cannot be erased from our memory. The 1986 Ukrainian nuclear disaster (like the Fukushima disaster) was almost instantly smothered with a deluge of false-flag pseudo-information on its supposed innocuity, including false information from the UN's IAEA “to protect the industry”. To date and across Europe early cancer deaths attributable to Chornobyl probably exceed 30 000 and economic damage is US dollars of 2014 value probably ranges from 350 – 500 billion. No “final sarcophage” at the Chornobyl disaster site yet exists – today in 2014 – for reasons including its extreme cost.

Both of these disasters were entirely and purely civil disasters. They were not due to military strike. In the Chornobyl case only one reactor was “fully exploded” and in the Fukushima case none were fully exploded – meaning large scale and sustained airborne release of the stricken reactor's radiological inventory. This will be the prime objective of any military attack on civil nuclear power plants.

In a bitter and escalating civil war with massive and soft nuclear targets available, who will be the first to take them out, dealing a death blow to the enemy?

Asymmetric War
“Zbig” himself uses the term. Vladimir Putin must be worn down and his domestic popularity eroded to nothing, preceding his overthrow by a Kremlin cabal, by using asymmetric war “in theater” in Ukraine.
Zbig says and publishes that the Kiev forces and their militias must be given all relevant and effective weapons. He lists them, also.

Tanks and heavy armor are useless. The insurgent fighters – exactly like ISIS fighters – need and want 30mm fast-fire cannons, light artillery, RPGs and their post-2000 advanced versions, MANPADS, night attack equipment and of course a deluge of infantry carbines. Everybody has heard about AK 47s and M16s (and why not Famas 5.56mm and British 7.63mm carbines?), equipped with so-called grenade launchers that are in fact small fire-and-forget missile launchers. Although Zbig does not mention it his list should include highly mobile, flexible and almost undetectable drones delivering small military charges to destroy key installations or infrastructures of the enemy. Others can be added. No problem.

Bulgarian knock-off copies of AK47s assembled using re-machined parts of US M16s can be had for way below 500 euros each. You can have your civil war cheap, although taking out the enemy's “nuclear assets' is going to cost a little more. But not much more.

Any NPP or nuclear power plant has to keep operating and can't be “turned off by the on-off switch”. Simply destroying its electrical installations and support such as its transformer stations and power lines will create a very dangerous situation for the targeted plant. When the plant is water-cooled, cutting its water supply will also threaten it. Its used fuel rod stores, if they are on site as in the case of Fukushima, are another uber-soft target for instant mayhem.

Nuclear Doomsday
The world's NPPs were built in a haze and daze of “no more war” euphoria. Nobody thought of them as prime targets in civil wars or designed them to resist that threat. Very belated attempts since 9 / 11 include the claims first by Germany's Siemens, then France's Areva that the EPR-European PWR is “terror proof”. The single threat retained is the crash of a wide-bodied jet on a European EPR.

What happens when military forces strike at its vital installations with the right ordnance?

The Chornobyl catastrophe of 1986 gives you a part-answer. It included the total evacuation of all persons from all cities, towns and human settlements within 75 kilometres of the disaster. The so-called “war preparedness and civilian morale” of the affected persons will be zero.

The total absence of any real and serious discusssion of this threat and this endgame scenario – possibly able to sterilize the whole of Ukraine under a worst case scenario – is to my mind one of the most shocking aspects of a drab but shocking rush to war of the west with Russia over the Ukraine.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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