Member-only story
Chernobyl Breached! Russia’s Drone Strike on Nuclear History’s Most Dangerous Ruin
News broke in February that should have sent shockwaves through global media but largely didn’t: on February 14, a Russian kamikaze drone struck the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
Yes, that Chernobyl, site of the worst nuclear accident in human history.
The drone punched a hole in the sarcophagus that shields over 200 tons of radioactive material. Not a ding or a scratch. A hole big enough to toss an SUV through.
And what Russia just did is far worse than it seems at first glance.
Chernobyl: A Time Bomb Buried in the Earth
For all the people on Earth who couldn’t place Ukraine on a map before 2022, the word Chernobyl still resonates. It’s the site of a man-made catastrophe that released 400 times more radioactive material than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
By the way, that was from just 5 percent of the reactor’s core.
The explosion in 1986 rendered a thousand square miles uninhabitable to this day. The infamous “exclusion zone” around Chernobyl remains one of the most contaminated places on the planet, and underneath the protective structure lies a radioactive nightmare: melted reactor fuel mixed with concrete, steel, and sand, forming a deadly…