Statement from Founder and Voluntary CEO of Chornobyl Children International, Adi Roche:

“This weekend, we woke up to the disturbing news that a nuclear waste storage facility at the Chornobyl* Nuclear Power Plant has been attacked and that, once again, highly dangerous nuclear facilities were used as a weapon of war.

Recent whispers of potential peace-talks and ceasefire in Ukraine have been potentially scuppered by this ultra-provocative and unprecedented attack.  It undermines and is contrary to everything that we have been trying to achieve.

I appeal, on behalf of all humanity and as a first-step towards peace negotiations, that the deadly and toxic Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, with its thousands of tons and gallons of highly radioactive material, no longer be targeted, or used as an area of shelling, bombardment, and ground fighting.  We must invoke the Hague Convention which defines any attack on a nuclear facility to be a ‘war crime’.

My greatest fear in this conflict is that the next Chornobyl will be Chornobyl itself.  This sacred area, an area of utter vulnerability and danger, a special area of human tragedy, could once again, have deadly radioactive contamination released which would spread everywhere.

This weaponising of nuclear power signifies to the world that the nature of modern warfare has changed forever, and brings with it a sense of foreboding for wars of the future.

Never before in the history of the atomic age have nuclear stations been used as weapons of war.  They should remain globally ‘off limits’ because of their lethal potential to destroy the planet.  The weaponising of nuclear facilities has resulted in a collision between warfare and nuclear power, which is a whole new threat with potentially devastating, unimaginable consequences for humankind for centuries to come.  This is nuclear terrorism.

Every day that peace in Ukraine is denied, we are rolling a dice.  If allowed to continue, one day our luck will run out.  We are staring down a barrel of a loaded gun.   Any potential explosion or meltdown at Chornobyl, or any other Nuclear Power Plant, by accident or design would cause irreversible damage to the environment and human life that will last for thousands of years.

Chornobyl has vast silos of nuclear waste and water, which are highly dangerous and volatile.  Along with hundreds of shallow ‘nuclear graves’, which are scattered throughout the Exclusion Zone, holding the contents of thousands of houses, machinery, buses and trucks, all of which have been buried there to keep the radiation underground.

In the name of humanity, in the name of the children, please stop this war and declare Chornobyl and all Nuclear Power Plants as ‘No War Zones’ as a starting point.

40 years on, Chornobyl has become a symbol, a potent enduring metaphor for catastrophe…a ‘cautionary tale’ we need to heed of, making sure never again.   We neglect Ukraine at our peril.