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Case for Military Proportionality: Disabling Nuclear Plants.

If a reactor’s spent fuel pond storage system was hit, the likely radiological releases could force millions of people to evacuate……………… In an attack against a spent fuel storage facility, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff conservatively estimate the radiological release could be 100 times greater than that of the Fukushima accident.²⁰

Today, nuclear plants can be disabled in many ways without risking harmful releases of radiation. The Russians, in the Russia-Ukraine War, have demonstrated several disabling techniques

 Russia’s attacks afford a clear example of disabling critical civilian objects (reactors) to its military advantage without releasing hazardous radiation

By: Henry Sokolski, Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, September 16, 2025 

For nearly a decade, protecting civilians and civil objects from disproportionate military assaults has been a top priority of the Pentagon. Two Department of Defense secretaries from the first Donald Trump administration championed quantifying and reducing harm to civilians and civil objects. Under the Joe Biden administration, the Pentagon further focused on protecting civilians and civil objects, and, in 2023, Congress created a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence within the Department of Defense. This center, consisting of a staff of 30 people with an annual budget of $7 million, helped military commands execute their missions while minimizing collateral damage.¹

In early 2025, however, the Pentagon cut the funding and eliminated almost all the staff in the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office and the Center and asked Congress to eliminate the legal requirement for its continued operation. Rattled, some wondered if the Department of War was rescinding its previous guidance on limiting civilian harm. The answer to the question was unclear.²

Trump administration officials stated the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence jeopardized war fighters’ abilities to do their jobs. But those officials did not discuss a deeper set of developments: Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israeli citizens; Israel’s crushing response, which killed thousands of noncombatants; and Russia’s attacks against Ukrainian civilians and civil infrastructure. Each development challenged many experts’ previous beliefs about what proportionality should prohibit.

Both Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu insist their military operations are proportionate. These claims, in turn, rely on an American view of proportionality Abraham Lincoln’s top military and legal adviser, Francis Lieber, promulgated in the 1860s. The Lieber Code (General Orders No. 100) championed avoiding attacks on civilians and civilian objects. But the code also allowed, if a compelling military objective emerged whose achievement incidentally entailed harming civilian people and objects, that attacks were permissible. Commanders on the front lines should decide what actions are militarily justified or not, according to the code.³

Some have argued Lieber’s view renders proportionality hopelessly subjective. If commanders were free to determine what actions are justified, proportionality would seem to be little more than a standard of behavior the weak may demand of the strong, but the strong can effectively ignore. Victorious nations rarely litigate against their own officials or officers for disproportionate military actions (that is, for ignoring or violating the requirements of proportionality).⁴

Therefore, enforcing proportionality against defeated foreign nations might be attractive, but demanding one’s own military enforce proportionality is less realistic or practical. At best, realists argue, limiting harm to civil persons and objects is advisory; institutionalizing or promoting proportionality by creating Pentagon centers goes too far.

This line of thinking is intuitive and appealing. But it ignores a critical point: Sparing civilians and civilian objects unnecessary harm is often essential to achieving military victory.

Carl von Clausewitz, known for championing the necessity of violence in battle, was just as emphatic that wars could only be won by reaching political solutions the enemy’s military and leadership—and the enemy’s population—could accept. Needlessly killing civilians and destroying infrastructure critical to their welfare only complicates reaching lasting political solutions. For Clausewitz, the need to inflict violence in war had to be measured against the war’s ultimate objective, which is always political. Violence against civilians is self-defeating if it undermines the achievement of the war’s ultimate political objective.⁵

Thus, Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower resisted calls in 1944 for the indiscriminate bombing of French cities and infrastructure during World War II because though such bombings would weaken German defenses, they would also dramatically undermine French political support of the Allied powers and the Allies’ resistance to the Nazis. Indiscriminate bombing would also complicate the reconstruction of the French economy after the Allies won the war.⁶

For similar reasons, President Harry S. Truman rejected the advice of his commander in the field, General Douglas MacArthur, who wanted to use nuclear weapons on North Korea and China. Truman feared attacking these states with nuclear weapons would escalate the conflict, cause unnecessary destruction, and turn international public opinion against the United States. Truman understood maintaining international support was essential to containing China and deterring Russia’s use of nuclear weapons after the end of the Korean War.⁷

One of Adolf Hitler’s best generals—Erwin Rommel—also refrained from using excessive force against civilians to protect his communications and supply lines from local disruption. Rommel understood that, in some cases, good military discipline and order required restraint, as did pacific relations with the local population (for example, in Northern Africa). Rommel’s attention to these points helped secure supply lines and reduced local resistance to his forces’ operations.⁸

Nazi troops terrorized enemy populations, but General Walther Wever, who served as the Luftwaffe’s chief of staff in the mid-1930s, argued such actions. Responsible for formulating Germany’s military air doctrine, Wever rejected the idea of bombing cities to break the will of the people. Wever believed such attacks were, at best, distractions from the Luftwaffe’s main mission: destroying the enemy’s armed forces. Wever also believed terror bombing was militarily self-defeating because it increased, rather than reduced, local resistance, jeopardizing the achievement of the Luftwaffe’s prime military missions.⁹

Besides these arguments, there are additional reasons for not hitting certain civilian facilities. Attacking chemical plants and nuclear facilities can poison the theater of operations with dangerous contaminants and hamper military operations (for example, if a dam is attacked, flooding the terrain). Such attacks can also prompt major evacuations which, in turn, retard military movements.

However, another advantage of avoiding conducting military assaults on civilian objects relates to military cohesion. As I noted in a previous Parameters article, Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions specifically discourages nations from attacking civilian objects, especially if doing so would risk releasing “hazardous forces” that could inflict “severe harm” on innocent civilians. Although the United States has signed the protocol, 174 nations took the additional step of ratifying it. The United States chose not to do so. As such, the United States is at odds with most of its NATO Allies.¹⁰

Thus, in 2022, foreign and military ministers in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Germany declared Russian strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure and the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant were prosecutable war crimes. The United States took no position. In a war game conducted in 2022, close US Allies that have ratified Protocol I were at odds with Washington regarding how to respond to Russian attacks on Allied reactors. The United States’ Allies wanted to respond strongly to what they saw as a war crime, whereas the United States did not. In the game, the other NATO members were concerned NATO would be drawn into a larger conflict if Poland and Ukraine jointly attacked Russia. These concerns held up war operations and resulted in the United States using Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty to keep Poland from participating in a Ukrainian strike against Russia.¹¹

Finally, temporarily disabling civilian infrastructure (for example, water, gas, and oil pumps; energy pipelines; telecommunications lines; and electrical-supply systems) can afford clear military advantages over physically obliterating civilian infrastructure, even if no hazardous forces are released. The temporary disablement of civilian infrastructure deprives one’s enemy of the ability to use infrastructure facilities, facilitates their subsequent use by one’s own forces in war, and allows for their speedy repatriation once the war is over.¹²

All of these points recommend fostering effective military applications of proportionality against civilian objects. The question is how.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….If a reactor’s spent fuel pond storage system was hit, the likely radiological releases could force millions of people to evacuate, as confirmed by US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, government-sponsored, and private studies. The areas rendered uninhabitable could also be quite large: from 30,000 to 100,000 square kilometers (the latter area is larger than the entire state of New Jersey). In an attack against a spent fuel storage facility, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff conservatively estimate the radiological release could be 100 times greater than that of the Fukushima accident.²⁰

The case of an attack against a spent fuel storage facility is extreme. A less dramatic scenario is the radiological release attendant to a loss of coolant induced by a military assault. Still, a wholesale, indiscriminate attack against Iran’s Bushehr power reactor could release significant radiation and force the evacuation of hundreds of thousands to millions of nearby civilians.²¹

Wholesale, indiscriminate attacks are precisely the kind of assault diplomats and lawyers aimed to prevent when they crafted Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions a half century ago. This international framework has several provisions that focus on the most likely type of military assault against nuclear power plants at the time: wholesale aerial attacks, which were almost certain to trigger massive releases of radioactivity. Today, things are different. With precision targeting and tailored munitions, nuclear power plants can be disabled in many ways without releasing radiation.²²

Oddly, this transition to precision is still not fully reflected in the Pentagon’s legal guidance on targeting nuclear plants. …………………………………………………………………………………

Today, median miss distances for precision weapons are measured in meters or in smaller units. As a result, nuclear plants can be disabled in many ways without risking harmful releases of radiation. The Russians, in the Russia-Ukraine War, have demonstrated several disabling techniques……………

Through repeated strikes on these nonnuclear components, Russia has succeeded in shutting down Europe’s largest nuclear power plant—the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant. In addition, Putin can now collapse Ukraine’s entire electrical-supply system at a time of his choosing. Meanwhile, Russia says it could restart the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant to supply electricity to territories occupied by Russia in a matter of months.

More could be said about Russia’s studied targeting of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants and electrical-power systems. But Russia’s attacks afford a clear example of disabling critical civilian objects (reactors) to its military advantage without releasing hazardous radiation.²⁶

Of course, other nuclear examples should be considered. Some states use portions of their civilian nuclear programs to make nuclear-weapons materials—for example, China, India, and North Korea. Disabling the facilities used to make nuclear-weapons materials would be a worthy military objective. Physically, obliterating those facilities and risking the widespread dispersal of harmful radiation, however, could be militarily counterproductive.median miss distances for precision weapons are measured in meters or in smaller units. As a result, nuclear plants can be disabled in many ways without risking harmful releases of radiation. The Russians, in the Russia-Ukraine War, have demonstrated several disabling techniques. These techniques exploited the nuclear-safety requirement for irradiated reactor fuel to be cooled continuously to prevent it from overheating, failing, and releasing dangerous, radioactive by-products.²⁴

Rather than prompting such failures, analysis suggests Russia has been careful to target the electrical power–supply systems needed to keep the nuclear plants’ cooling and safety systems running. Russia’s aim is twofold: first, to force the plants’ operators to shut them down for safety reasons, and second, to increase the credibility of making follow-on strikes that might risk a significant release of radiation.²⁵

The power-system components Russia has targeted include on- and off-site electrical transformers; high-voltage lines running in and out of the plants; cooling water supply systems; a major dam critical to supplying water to the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant; and major, off-site electrical power–generating plants needed to stabilize the electrical-supply grid supporting the nuclear plant’s safe operation…………………………

Recommendations

What steps can the US military take to update its plans and operations for targeting and protecting civil infrastructure?

First, the Pentagon should publicly share much more information about its thinking than it has to date, which would allow for greater civilian oversight, sharpen military planning, and increase the clarity of current policy and legal guidance.

Second, the Pentagon should work with private industry and other government departments focused on civil-infrastructure protection—the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission—to produce convincing public narratives about why and how civil objects should be protected and to improve existing protection schemes. Planning to protect this infrastructure has long been underway, but under the protection of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Critical Energy / Electric Infrastructure Information, which keeps these plans from the public. What’s needed is a sensible tear sheet for public consumption.²⁷

Third, the Department of War should offer Congress routine public reports about matters related to protecting civil infrastructure. The US government must prepare the public for a future in which the United States’ electrical-supply systems, energy pipelines, biological research facilities, potentially dangerous petrochemical plants, telecommunications systems, and civil nuclear facilities may come under attack. Setting the public’s expectations about what can and should be done, actively and passively, to defend these systems should not wait until an attack occurs.

Finally, training is critical. The Department of War’s military education training institutions should offer dedicated, unclassified courses that provide technical and historical instruction on the targeting and defense of civil objects. The instruction should be fortified by unclassified government simulations for civilians and military officials, which play out alternative targeting plans against civil objects that could release hazardous forces.

How will the US government accomplish these objectives? The first step is to make mastering these matters a requirement for military promotion. This step could be done quietly, without top-down scolding, legal hectoring, or creating centers. The best US military operators and planners already know civil objects and nuclear facilities are becoming increasingly significant military targets. The Pentagon should reward and support efforts to clarify what should be done to disable and protect civil objects and nuclear facilities.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Caitlyn Collett for providing essential assistance in the production and editing of this special commentary.

To read the full piece, click here.

September 22, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Russia, safety | Leave a comment