Editors’ Note: Mehran Haghirian is the Director of Research and Programs at the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation. His work centers on conflict resolution and diplomacy, with a particular focus on the Persian Gulf region. Haghirian holds a PhD in Gulf Studies from Qatar University and a master’s in International Affairs from American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. He currently leads the Integrated Futures Initiative, which focuses on fostering regional dialogue, diplomacy, and economic cooperation in the Gulf.

Ludovica Castelli is Project Manager within the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium based at the Istituto Affari Internazionali, and is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow in the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center, Harvard. She holds a PhD from the University of Leicester, where she was part of the ERC-funded “Third Nuclear Age” project. Her work focuses on Critical Security Studies, conceptual history, and nuclear studies, with a focus on the Middle East.

By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project

Recent attacks on and around nuclear facilities in the Persian Gulf have made increasingly visible a form of risk that has often remained secondary in regional security debates.

Civilian nuclear infrastructure, including facilities under international safeguards, is becoming increasingly intertwined with conflict. Repeated strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, including near the Bushehr nuclear power plant, together with a May 2026 drone strike near the Barakah nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), show how the prospect of radiological harm can be mobilized to reshape the costs of military action and extend risk to neighboring states and populations.

The strike near Barakah reportedly caused a fire in an electrical generator outside the plant’s inner site perimeter. UAE authorities later stated that technical tracking traced the drones to Iraqi territory. No radiological release occurred, and the plant itself was not damaged. Even so, the incident revealed how nuclear infrastructure in the Gulf is increasingly embedded in an active conflict environment, where drones, missiles, air-defense systems, proxy networks, external military operations, and surrounding energy infrastructure may intersect within the same escalatory space.

The danger lies not only in the direct targeting of a reactor, but also in the broader infrastructural setting that allows nuclear safety to be sustained. Strikes against external power supply, cooling-related systems, perimeter infrastructure, nearby military assets, or emergency-response capacity could gradually degrade the conditions that make nuclear safety possible and transform a local military incident into a broader regional concern.

Any potential agreement between Iran and the United States will likely not touch on this subject. However, there needs to be a parallel regional effort for deconfliction as well as cooperation on nuclear safety and security. Nuclear risk in the Persian Gulf is still most often approached through the familiar prism of proliferation, especially through questions about enrichment, safeguards compliance, and weaponization pathways. That dimension remains essential, but it now sits alongside another layer of nuclear politics, one that concerns the ways in which civilian nuclear infrastructure can be drawn into conflict and become part of the political management of risk.

Bushehr and Barakah are the two operating nuclear power plants on opposite shores of the Persian Gulf. Bushehr hosts a Russian-built VVER light-water reactor with an output of around 915 megawatts electric, with two additional units under construction. Barakah consists of four APR-1400 reactors with a total nameplate capacity of 5,600 megawatts. These facilities differ in design, historical context, supplier relationships, regulatory history, and political meaning. Yet they are embedded in the same maritime and regional environment, which means that their safety cannot be understood solely as a national matter or as a technical issue confined to the boundaries of each site.

This shared exposure is central to the region’s emerging nuclear security challenge. Bushehr and Barakah face the same narrow and environmentally fragile body of water, while Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the UAE are all connected through a regional ecology in which desalination systems, ports, fisheries, energy infrastructure, coastal economies, and dense population centers depend on the same maritime space. States that do not operate nuclear power plants are therefore still part of the geography of potential consequence. 

The UN Security Council’s renewed attention to threats against nuclear sites in the Gulf is important precisely because it reflects this wider understanding. Convened after Bahrain requested an emergency session on May 19, a Security Council meeting indicated that the issue had moved beyond a narrow bilateral or regional dispute and into the language of international peace and security. A briefing by the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, (IAEA) Rafael Grossi, gave institutional and technical weight to a concern that is often expressed in general terms. An attack on a nuclear site, or on systems essential to its safe operation, could affect neighboring states and populations.

The most immediate vulnerability is water. Gulf states depend heavily on desalination, and desalination depends on the same maritime environment that would be affected by any serious nuclear or radiological incident. The issue is not only the possibility of radioactive contamination. It is also the wider infrastructural and social disruption that could follow from uncertainty, contamination fears, interruptions to intake systems, precautionary shutdowns, or public concern over water safety. In a region where water security, food supply chains, ports, energy infrastructure, and coastal economies are tightly connected, nuclear safety is therefore also an environmental, infrastructural, and public-security concern.

These risks invite a careful reassessment of the existing legal and normative framework. Article 56 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventionremains the primary legal provision specifically addressing the protection of nuclear electrical generating stations during armed conflict. Other bodies of international humanitarian law, nuclear safety standards, nuclear security guidance, and emergency-preparedness mechanisms provide additional layers of protection. Taken together, however, these instruments address different aspects of the problem but leave important questions about the protection of nuclear facilities and their supporting systems during conflict environments. This is especially relevant where indirect attacks, proxy violence, cyber operations, air-defense activity, and nearby strikes may combine in ways that exceed the assumptions under which many of these frameworks were developed.

The war in Ukraine has already pushed this discussion forward. In response to repeated shelling around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the IAEA developed a series of ad hoc measures. Its “Seven Indispensable Pillars” identify the basic conditions required for the safe and secure operation of nuclear facilities during war, including physical integrity, functioning safety and security systems, secure operating conditions for staff, reliable off-site power, supply chains, radiation monitoring, and communication with regulators. These were later complemented by the “Five Concrete Principles” for protecting Zaporizhzhia, centered on preventing attacks from or against the plant, avoiding the military use of the site, protecting off-site power, preserving essential systems, and ensuring that no action undermines those commitments. Although developed in relation to Ukraine, this framework is relevant to the Persian Gulf because it shifts attention toward the wider military, infrastructural, and institutional environment that sustains nuclear safety.

The IAEA also has long-standing responsibilities in nuclear safety, emergency preparedness, and nuclear security. Its 13^th Nuclear Security Recommendations on Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and Nuclear Facilities has served since 2011 as an internationally recognized benchmark for physical protection standards, shaping national regulations, facility-level practices, and international cooperation. Yet this framework was largely designed around threats from non-state actors, especially sabotage and nuclear terrorism. The recent pattern of attacks and threats against nuclear facilities shows that this framing is not sufficient.  It must also account for state-level coercion, hybrid threats, proxy attacks, and prolonged crisis environments in which facilities may be placed under pressure, personnel may be threatened, and normal assumptions about access, safety culture, and emergency response may be strained.

The Gulf therefore needs a practical nuclear security agenda that begins from this more complex understanding of risk. A first step would be a regional commitment to protect nuclear infrastructure, either as part of a broader non-aggression arrangement or as a more focused confidence-building measure which would include regional proxies and non-state actors affiliated with regional states. Such a commitment should cover reactor buildings, research reactors, spent-fuel storage, external power supply, cooling systems, emergency-response infrastructure, and other systems essential to nuclear safety.

Such a norm would be strongest if sustained not only by littoral states, but by the external powers that shape the region’s nuclear and security environment through military presence, security partnerships, technological cooperation, sanctions, supplier relationships, and crisis diplomacy. The United States, Israel, Russia, China, and European states all have a role in shaping how nuclear infrastructure is treated in regional conflict. A credible commitment to nuclear safety therefore requires a degree of consistency across cases. The protection of Bushehr and Barakah should be understood as part of the same normative problem, since selective concern would weaken the very principle that civilian nuclear infrastructure ought to remain outside the conduct of regional military escalation.

This debate is especially urgent in light of the recent failure of the NPT Review Process to reach consensus, a breakdown driven largely by unresolved divisions over Iran-specific language, the legality and implications of attacks on safeguarded nuclear facilities, and wider disagreements over disarmament and regional security. Language on attacks against nuclear facilities was not accepted in the draft text at the very moment when the strike near Barakah placed the issue back on the regional agenda. This diplomatic gap points to a broader challenge for the non-proliferation regime, which has traditionally focused on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. A regime concerned with nuclear restraint, responsibility, and international confidence would be strengthened by more systematic engagement with the ways in which civilian nuclear facilities can be placed at risk during war.

Regional institutions could also play a constructive role. The Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment, or ROPME, is one of the few bodies that includes all eight littoral states of the Persian Gulf. Its mandate is environmental rather than nuclear, yet a nuclear or radiological incident in the Gulf would also be an environmental crisis. ROPME could therefore provide a platform for environmental monitoring, seawater testing, information-sharing, and technical coordination in collaboration with the IAEA. This would connect nuclear emergency preparedness to the Gulf’s shared ecological reality and create practical channels of cooperation in a politically divided region.

The region has reached a point where nuclear risk can usefully be understood beyond the familiar geography of Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. The incidents around Bushehr and Barakah should be treated as warnings about the ways in which civilian nuclear infrastructure is becoming more exposed to regional escalation and more relevant to the political management of risk. They show how material vulnerabilities can acquire political significance in moments of crisis, how localized incidents can generate regional anxieties, and how the protection of nuclear infrastructure increasingly requires rules, expectations, and mechanisms that are built before an accident or attack forces the issue into view.