From Zaporizhzhia to Natanz, nuclear piracy is equally dangerous—and illegal

On September 23, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine faced a complete loss of external off-site power—for the 10th time since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The event forced Europe’s largest nuclear power plant to rely on its own diesel generators, which are the last line of defense against a station blackout and potential fuel melt leading to a reactor accident. Rather than being seen as a long-delayed global wake-up call, power loss was treated as just another incident, which was once virtually unimaginable.

Over time, the dangerous situation at Zaporizhzhia has become the new normal. For more than three years now, the facility has remained under Russian military control, a permanent fixture of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The world’s attention has drifted. The regular reports from the observers of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on site—detailing drone activity, nearby explosions, and the persistent fragility of its external power supply—no longer command front-page headlines. This normalization is a profound danger in itself. The international community has become accustomed to nuclear piracy: the seizure or exploitation—or both—of a civilian nuclear facility by a state for strategic and military advantage.

The international community did not act decisively, even during last year’s IAEA international conference on nuclear security, the most prominent of such conferences. Due to this lack of action, the crisis at Zaporizhzhia has not been contained and has now metastasized. The military occupation of Zaporizhzhia is not the most shocking development of the crisis. It is the failure by the international community to resolve the Zaporizhzhia crisis that sent a clear—yet chilling—message across the globe: There are no meaningful consequences for committing acts of piracy against nuclear facilities, thereby emboldening the use of military strikes for counter-proliferation elsewhere.

From occupation to strikes. The dire consequences of inaction against the Zaporizhzhia crisis became clear as the doctrine of targeting nuclear facilities evolved in terrifying ways. While the seizure of Zaporizhzhia represented a new form of coercion, it also emboldened an even more dangerous practice: Direct kinetic attacks for counter-proliferation, such as Israeli and US attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Such attacks are not new. They started during World War II with the sabotage of the Norsk Hydro plant to stop the German heavy water production and continued with Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor and its 2007 strike on a suspected Syrian reactor. Iran, too, launched strikes against the Osirak facility during the Iran-Iraq War. What has changed since these early attacks and makes the current situation so profoundly dangerous is the normalization of this practice by the very states that act as guardians of the non-proliferation regime under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The grim logic has been amplified: With no penalty for holding a plant hostage, the threshold for attacking one from a distance has also been lowered.

Throughout the Zaporizhzhia crisis, the United States was a vocal supporter of the IAEA’s “Seven Indispensable Pillars of Nuclear Safety and Security.” However, this support was tragically undermined by actions taken during the so-called “12-day war” between Israel, supported by the United States, and Iran in June. During that war, a series of coordinated Israeli and then US military strikes targeted several of Iran’s nuclear facilities—in violation of the nuclear safeguards agreement. The attacks on the hardened sites at Natanz and Fordow were not acts of sabotage; they were military operations designed to cripple Iran’s enrichment capabilities.

These attacks dealt another blow to the fragile norm against attacking safeguarded nuclear facilities of an NPT signatory state. While the immediate risk of a massive radiological release from an enrichment facility is lower than from an operating reactor, the damage to the global non-proliferation order is arguably more severe. The lesson from these attacks should be clear: Counter-proliferation by force, without prior authorization from the UN Security Council, has become a tool. This precedent will provide a powerful justification for any state wishing to argue that nuclear facilities are now simply part of the modern battlespace.

This new reality is compounded by the paralysis of global institutions. The UN Security Council—the designated arbiter of international peace and security—is rendered impotent by the veto power of its five permanent members, among them Russia and the United States, which are now the chief normalizers of this reckless behavior. Existing international humanitarian law, including Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits attacks against “installations containing dangerous forces”—including dams and nuclear power plants—has proven to be a fragile bulwark against a determined aggressor.

Securing the future. The old security framework is not just outdated; it is irrelevant to this new era. “Guns, guards, and gates” around nuclear facilities cannot stop a state-launched missile or a sophisticated air force attack. This new normal is first and foremost a crisis of international order and a catastrophic failure of imagination, not merely one of physical security. The core challenge is the erosion of norms by the very NPT nuclear-weapon states meant to uphold them.

Restoring the security of nuclear facilities requires a fundamental reconstruction of the global nuclear governance architecture, moving from reaction to prevention. A path forward should include these steps:

The law must be made explicit and unforgiving. The international community must move to codify prohibitions against attacks on, and the military seizure of, civilian nuclear facilities that comply with the IAEA safeguards regime. These actions should be considered as a distinct violation of international law, on par with the use of chemical or biological weapons. For this provision to be effective, however, the UN Security Council must be able to act. That’s why proposals like Finland’s recent call at the UN General Assembly to limit the veto are important. The principle must be zero tolerance, with automatic, severe, and multilateral sanctions—including financial, technological, and diplomatic isolation—triggered by any such action against nuclear facilities.

The watchdog must be given teeth. The IAEA’s nuclear safety and security mandate needs a radical expansion. The agency has performed admirably under impossible circumstances, but its role as a neutral observer is no longer sufficient. The diplomatic chaos following the Cairo agreement earlier in September—during which the world was left to parse conflicting statements from the IAEA and Iranian officials about what was actually agreed upon regarding site access—demonstrates that the agency cannot be merely a facilitator; it must have unambiguous authority. While a new, universal treaty is unlikely, a new optional protocol to the NPT, akin to the Additional Protocol, might be the solution that grants the IAEA enhanced authority. States that ratify this protocol would be signaling their commitment to nuclear security, while its implications will take years to see.

The international community must embrace safeguards by design and security by policy. Passive safety systems that can maintain cooling without external power for extended periods must become the mandatory global standard, a principle of “safeguards by design” that enhances safety and reduces proliferation risks. In addition, international financing bodies—from the World Bank to national export-credit agencies—should refuse to underwrite the construction of nuclear power plants in regions of high political instability or unresolved border disputes. There must be guardrails against building new strategic vulnerabilities, an approach that supports both the non-proliferation regime and the development of nuclear energy.

A world in which nuclear facilities are viewed as legitimate targets on the chessboard of conflict is unsustainable. Rebuilding the non-attack norm will require more than a one-time condemnation or the establishment of new non-binding mechanisms. It will require courage, creativity, and an unwavering international commitment to ensure that the gates of this dangerous new era of nuclear piracy are closed for good, before a preventable nuclear catastrophe happens.