The new type of terrorism is also refuelling debate on the "peaceful use of nuclear energy" and warfare. This is still largely a taboo topic in the nuclear community. In tense areas such as the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, Iran, India, or Pakistan, existing reactors could have consequences as fatal as they are unintended. Once these plants are operating, enemy forces do not need their own atomic bombs to cause radioactive destruction. A conventional air force - or artillery - would suffice. In light of this, those attempting to link nuclear energy to the notion of a "secure energy supply" have clearly not thought far enough. There is no other technology for which a single event can trigger the collapse of an entire pillar of energy supply. An economy that depends on this type of technology constitutes the very opposite of a secure energy supply. In the event of war, it is more vulnerable to conventional attacks than an economy without this technology.
In explaining his decision to shift from supporting to opposing nuclear power, physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in 1985 said, "Worldwide proliferation of nuclear power requires a radical worldwide change in the political structure of all cultures existing today. It requires transcending the political institution of war, which has been in existence at least since the beginning of high culture."8 Von Weizsäcker concluded, however, that the political and cultural foundations for world peace are nowhere in sight. In times of "asymmetric violence", in which highly ideological extremists prepare for war against powerful industrial states, or for that matter for a comprehensive "clash of cultures", sustainable world peace would recede even further than when von Weizsäcker was formulating his insights in 1985.
Threats to nuclear power plants in the course of armed conflict are not merely hypothetical. In the Balkan conflict in the early 1990s, for example, the nuclear reactor in the Slovenian city of Krsko could have become a target on a number of occasions. Yugoslavian bombers flew over the reactor to demonstrate a potential escalation of hostilities. It is by no means certain that Israel would have refrained from its 1981 air strike on the construction site for the Osirak research reactor in Iraq if the 40-megawatt plant had been in operation. The attack was defended as a pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein's attempt to build the first "Islamic bomb". American bombers renewed the attack on the construction site during the 1991 Gulf War and in retaliation Saddam Hussein aimed his Scud missiles at the Israeli nuclear headquarters at Dimona. Even as recently as late 2005, there has been talk of Israeli plans to strike alleged secret nuclear facilities in Iran.
There are a number of plausible scenarios in which parties involved in warfare or armed conflict could decide to attack nuclear facilities in their enemies' countries. One possibility is a pre-emptive strike against the enemy's presumed ambitions to build a bomb, often closely linked to nuclear facilities in developing and transitioning countries. Another is the intention to unleash the greatest possible degree of fear. It is a brutal fact that a state whose actual or potential enemies have nuclear power plants can spare itself the arduous path of building its own atomic bomb. Attacking the enemy's civilian power stations is as good as having a bomb of one's own because a commercial nuclear power plant holds, in order of magnitude, more radioactivity than is released by exploding an atomic bomb; long-term radioactive contamination from a "successful" attack on a power plant would be much more drastic than that from a bomb.
8 Cited in Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich and Bertram Schefold, Die Grenzen der Atomwirtschaft, (Munich, 1986), pp.14/16
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