As a projectile landed barely 350 metres from Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant on Saturday, the fourth such strike since the war began on February 28, concerns spanned across the Gulf region.
Bushehr, itself a city of around 2,50,000 people, is considerably closer to Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar than it is to the Iranian capital.
The three desert states, facing Iran on the opposite side of the Persian Gulf, have minimal natural water reserves and are home to more than 18 million people whose only supply of potable water is desalinated water drawn from the Gulf.
Add to this, concerns flagged by the IAEA and experts about the plant’s easy-to-hit above-ground reactor design. Should a strike hit the reactor or fuel storage pools, radiological particles, specifically the hazardous isotope Caesium-137, will be released into the atmosphere. Food, soil and water in the impact zone would be contaminated, possibly for decades.
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