Playing With Nuclear Fire in Ukraine
Last Friday’s shelling of the Zaporizhzhia complex showed there’s more than one way for Russia to escalate the war using nukes
Of all the wild and crazy ideas for ending Russia’s war on Ukraine that I’ve seen floated, none is stupider this one from tech VC Jason Calacanis: “If we want to stop Russia immediately, every western country should pass binding, emergency legislation to build an additional 10 new nuclear plants in the next decade. 100–200 new nuclear power plants would collapse the Russia economy *permanently*. Done.”
He tweeted that two days ago, a day after Russian forces shelled and then seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has six Russian-designed reactors. It’s stupid not only because Calacanis imagines that Vladimir Putin might be stopped in his tracks by the passage of legislation, and not only because he thinks permanently collapsing Russia’s economy would be a good thing (after all, the near-collapse of the Russian economy in the 1990s helped fuel Putin’s rise to power). If the point of building more nuclear power plants is to reduce Western dependence on Russian oil and gas, we can do that now with emergency legislation building more solar and wind energy farms, which can come online in a matter of months rather than the 5–6 years it takes…
