ATOMS FOR PEACE AND ATOMS FOR WAR IN UKRAINE’S NUCLEAR HISTORY
Forty years after the Chornobyl disaster, the essay reflects on the impact of peaceful and weaponized nuclear energy in Ukraine’s history. One of the leading nuclear energy operators in the world, Ukraine suffered the worst nuclear accident in history, which had wide-ranging geopolitical consequences. One of them was to influence Ukraine’s decision to surrender the nuclear weapons inherited from the USSR, a decision that ultimately exposed. Ukraine to Russian predation. After its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow proceeded to create and manipulate unprecedented nuclear dangers for Ukraine’s civilian nuclear infrastructure, blurring – as it once did in Chornobyl – the distinction between atoms for peace and atoms for war.
Issue 2026, 1: