Donald Trump has opened the military door to an atomic apocalypse.
But it’s likeliest to come through the “Peaceful Atom Window.”
The 400+ atomic power reactors (94 in the US) now operating worldwide are all sitting ducks for low-tech attack.
Iran or any other nation or terror group, with or without a nuclear warhead, can blow apart any commercial reactor with a single drone.
The resulting apocalypse can be spreading as you read this.
Commercial atomic power makes nuclear warheads ridiculously obsolete. The Trump/Netanyahu attacks on Iran’s alleged bomb factories ae marginal at most to today’s atomic reality.
Once blown apart by a drone, earthquake, tsunami, human error, equipment failure or simple sabotage, any atomic reactor can irradiate a continent, an ocean… the planet as a whole.
All commercial reactors operating in the world today are without comprehensive private insurance.
They are sitting naked ducks…absurdly vulnerable to a simple low-level attack from a single combatant with a drone, mortar, instrument of sabotage.
Fallout from Chernobyl, in 1986, irradiated most of Europe, much of Asia, and was detected all the way across the continental US. Twice.
It killed at least a million humans and cost at least a trillion dollars, probably far more.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2974725
Billions of gallons of lethal radioactive liquid still pour into the Pacific Ocean from the 2011 disaster at Fukushima, with no end in sight, and no credible way to gauge the permanent damage to our global ecosystems. But radioactive tuna did turn up within weeks off the coast of California.
Fukushima spewed more than 100X more radioactive cesium into the air than the combined Bombings at Hiroshima & Nagasaki.
If Iran or any other nation, however small, with or without actual atomic weaponry, were serious about inflicting unlimited radioactive damage on a perceived enemy or the planet as a whole, it does not need a warhead or a missile….just a single drone to take down an atomic reactor.
Thus the Trump/Netanyahu attack on Iran’s warhead production is of zero military meaning. It offers the world no respite from the threat of atomic annihilation.
Russia’s Putin has already served many warnings. On February 14, 2025, he crashed a drone into the sarcophagus that covers the still-steaming exploded core at Chernobyl, inflicting millions in damage and threatening the world with another apocalyptic release.
Putin’s mortar shells continue to fly around and about the dozen commercial reactors perched like eggshells in the Ukrainian war zone.
None are protected with multi-billion-dollar shields like the one at Chernobyl. After seventy years in development, no US reactor can get private insurance against a catastrophic disaster.
The two reactors at Diablo Canyon, California, are more than 40 years old. They’re internally embrittled, hopelessly fragile, surrounded by seismic faults, violating state and federal environmental laws, gouging California with the continental US’s highest electric bills. An apocalyptic cloud will inevitably pour down the coast into Los Angeles when the “Big One” turns those reactors into radioactive rubble.
The global insurance industry has de facto pronounced these reactors “UNSAFE!” by refusing to cover liability for a major disaster.
No big city in the US, Europe or Asia is immune to annihilation from the fallout that could be imposed by a single drone, seismic shock or tsunami hitting a single atomic reactor. Millions of downwind humans will die, trillions in economic and ecological damage will threaten the ability of our species to survive on this planet.
Thus the Trump/Netanyahu attack on Iran’s atomic weaponry has in no way made our species safer. On a planet filled with atomic reactors, atomic warheads are an afterthought.
Thankfully, ALL these reactors can be rapidly replaced with solar, wind, geothermal, battery storage, efficiency and other Solartopian technologies that are safer, cheaper, cleaner, more reliable, more job producing and faster to build than anything fossil/nuclear.
They could save a global economy and ecology now death threatened by both atomic warheads and nuclear reactors.
Without eliminating BOTH, our species has no future.
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Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman wrote SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, & co-wrote KILLING OUR OWN: THE DISASTER OF AMERICA’S EXPERIENCE WITH ATOMIC RADIATION. Most Mondays he co-convenes the Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition Zooms (www.grassrootsep.org)