The West rejects the Kremlin’s claim that kyiv wants to use a nuclear device to simulate an abnormal detonation of a Russian warhead
A team of experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will travel to Ukraine to analyze the Russian complaint that the kyiv government is finalizing the manufacture of a ‘dirty bomb’. The agency has accepted an offer from the Zelensky Executive to “rule out on the ground” Moscow’s “misleading” accusations, Foreign Minister Dimitro Kuleba reported yesterday.
The IAEA limited itself to confirming that it is “analyzing” the situation and the conflicting statements of the two sides. The Kremlin claims that the Ukrainian government has orchestrated the detonation of a low-level radioactive device on its own territory to blame Russia and unleash a powerful international response. kyiv believes that the complaint is a “pretext” for Vladimir Putin – “the only one capable of doing something like this”, according to Zelensky – to launch a limited nuclear attack against his troops. If the date of the expedition is announced, it will be the second IAEA mission in the former Soviet republic since the beginning of the invasion due to a radiological threat.
The purpose of the previous one was to inspect the Zaporizhia plant, subjected to crossfire from the two armies and surrounded by a belt of mines that have caused several incidents in the facilities. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu is convinced that kyiv wants to turn the nuclear plant into another kind of “dirty bomb” with its attacks.
The international convulsion is now capitalized. ‘Dirty bomb’ is not an easy term to digest. And yet, it has been dormant at the heart of the war for months. It is a relatively cheap artifact and not too complex to manufacture if the radioactive element is available: that source and a few sticks of dynamite are enough. In 1987 it was used once in the Iran-Iraq war. Then it was discontinued. Although it seems too crude, in war terms it killed little compared to a thermonuclear explosion. However, it has always been like a feared weapon in the hands of terrorists. Hence, the special effort of international security agencies to prevent the illegal trafficking of atomic waste.
“Clearly false”
The United States, France and the United Kingdom yesterday rejected the “clearly false” version of the Kremlin, hours after Shoigu spoke on Sunday with his counterparts in those countries. Turkey, with whom the minister also had a conversation, is the only interlocutor that has not spoken. The head of Ukrainian diplomacy contacted these and other governments yesterday to deny the complaint, demand the condemnation of Russia for its “lie” and request the urgent inclusion of Ukraine in NATO as a shield against a hypothetical nuclear aggression.
The Kremlin, for its part, insisted on its thesis and assured that it has evidence to prove it. “Distrust of information shared by the Russian side does not mean that the threat does not exist. The threat is obvious,” warned spokesman Dimitri Peskov. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov added that he will file a complaint with the UN and said that “we have information, which we have re-examined through the appropriate channels, that it is not an empty suspicion.”
What information is that? The Russian Government affirms that two Ukrainian radiological laboratories are working in the final phase of manufacturing the device. The scientists would have used treated uranium from the Zhjovty Vody mines – the most important in the country – or remains from the fuel pools of three nuclear power plants under their control or a small portion of the 50,000 cubic meters of atomic waste stored in Chernobyl. The material would have been transferred to the Pridniprovskiy chemical plant, in the Dnepropetrovsk region,
To what extent can this concatenation of details be credible or be a story stitched together from general data? The West does not give it any validity, despite the fact that the head of the Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops of the Russian Armed Forces, Igor Kirillov, took pains to explain yesterday that such an artifact could be “masked as an abnormal detonation”. of a low-power nuclear warhead. In his opinion, an explosion, even a very slight one, would make it possible to detect radioactive isotopes on the ground and blame the Kremlin for the firing of an atomic missile. Kirillov was the author in May of a theory that later fell into complete oblivion that several pharmaceutical companies were working on the manufacture of biological weapons for the Kiev Army with the acquiescence of the United States.
Experts believe that a low-intensity ‘dirty bomb’ is lethal to people in the area of the explosion, while long-term cancers may develop in remote areas. Its purpose is to disperse radioactive particles capable of contaminating land and, according to the IAEA, what it seeks is to sow “panic and social disturbances.”
The two known cases of the use of these weapons occurred in 1995 and 1998. In the first, a Chechen terrorist group planted a device loaded with Celsium-135 in a Moscow park to blackmail the Russian government. He did not detonate it. Three years later, another cell left a similar bomb in Grozny. Now the ‘dirty bombs’ are causing fear and alarm again. Like after 9/11, when millions of people wondered what kind of criminal terror could be more brutal than the heinous demolition of the Twin Towers, and the answer was nuclear.
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