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ANALYSIS SERIES
Analysis//0001/April/2026/London-Dialogue. 14 April 2026.
The U.S.-Israel strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025 mark one of the most consequential departures from the laws of armed conflict in decades. The legal framework governing such strikes is not ambiguous—multiple overlapping instruments of international law prohibit them. What makes this moment uniquely dangerous, however, is a dimension that has received insufficient attention: Russian engineers and technicians are working at Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. Killing them would transform a bilateral military confrontation into a potential great-power crisis.
This piece examines the legal architecture that prohibits attacks on nuclear facilities, the specific escalation risks created by the presence of Russian personnel at Bushehr, and what policymakers must urgently do to arrest a dangerous precedent before it becomes normalised.
What the Law Actually Says?
The most direct prohibition is Article 56 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. It prohibits attacks on “nuclear electrical generating stations” even when those installations constitute military objectives if an attack risks releasing dangerous forces causing severe civilian harm. Bushehr, as an operational nuclear power plant, falls squarely within this protected category. Neither the United States nor Israel has ratified Additional Protocol I—but this prohibition is widely recognised as customary international law, binding on all states regardless of treaty membership.
The threshold for overriding this protection is deliberately high. Article 56(2) permits attacks only when a facility “is used in regular, significant and direct support of military operations” and when the strike is “the only feasible way to terminate such support”. Characterising an enrichment plant as a proliferation risk does not satisfy that standard. The nexus required is to active military operations, not to latent weapons potential.
The IAEA’s legal framework reinforces this. The 2005 Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material—in force since 2016—obliges states parties to criminalise acts of sabotage against nuclear facilities likely to cause radiological release. A military strike producing that result, undertaken without recognised legal justification, is functionally indistinguishable from state-sanctioned sabotage. The IAEA’s authoritative physical protection guidance, INFCIRC/225/Rev.5, establishes that the objective of any nuclear security regime is to protect against “unauthorised removal and sabotage”—a consensus that military planners are expected to internalise, not circumvent.
Under the UN Charter, the picture is equally stark. Article 2(4) prohibits the use of force against another state’s territorial integrity. Exceptions exist only for genuine self-defence under Article 51—requiring an armed attack or credible imminent threat—and for Security Council authorisation under Chapter VII. None of the Security Council resolutions on Iran’s nuclear programme—including Resolutions 1737, 1747, 1803, and 1929—authorised military force. Resolution 2231, which endorsed the JCPOA, was premised on diplomacy and verified compliance, not coercive strikes. The June 2025 attacks operate in a zone of serious contested legality.
The Russia Problem
This is where the conflict acquires a dimension that most analysts have underweighted. Bushehr is not merely an Iranian facility. It was built by Rosatom State Corporation under agreements dating to 1992, and Unit 1—a 1,000-megawatt VVER-1000 pressurised water reactor—achieved commercial operation in 2013. Units 2 and 3, both VVER-1200 reactors with a combined capacity exceeding 2,100 megawatts, are currently under construction. Rosatom supplies the enriched uranium fuel, manages the fuel cycle, and stations technical personnel on-site for reactor operation and maintenance. At any given time, conservative estimates suggest several hundred Russian nationals—engineers, reactor technicians, construction workers, and project managers—are present at the Bushehr site.
A U.S. or Israeli strike on Bushehr that kills Russian nationals would not be an incident. It would be a crisis. Under established principles of state responsibility, the killing of a permanent UN Security Council member’s nationals in a deliberate military attack creates legal claims Moscow would have every interest in pressing—and political pressure to act on.
The escalation pathway runs beyond the legal. Putin’s government has repeatedly invoked the protection of Russian nationals as justification for military action; the precedent from Ukraine is well-documented. An attack on Bushehr would create a scenario structurally analogous, with the distinction that the United States, not a neighbouring state, would bear direct responsibility. Moscow’s response options include supplying Iran with advanced air defence systems, vetoing any Security Council resolution seeking to manage the aftermath, accelerating arms transfers, and—in the worst case—treating Russian military advisers present at the site as having been deliberately targeted, triggering mutual defence calculations that would have been unthinkable weeks earlier.
Russia’s stake in the JCPOA architecture, as a P5+1 party, means it would arrive at any post-strike diplomatic forum as an aggrieved party with leverage and grievance in equal measure. The destruction of an installation in which Russia has invested billions of dollars, and in which its nationals were actively working, is not a development that Moscow would absorb without consequence.
This is not an isolated scenario. The globalised structure of civilian nuclear cooperation means Rosatom’s personnel are embedded at facilities across multiple countries—Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh, India, China, Belarus, and Finland. South Korean and French companies build reactors in the UAE and elsewhere. If the precedent established at Bushehr stands, every nuclear facility with third-country personnel becomes a potential flashpoint for multi-state escalation on the same model.
The IAEA’s Constrained Role
The IAEA is mandated to monitor safeguards compliance and promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy. It is not an enforcement body in active conflict zones. Its ability to inspect and verify depends on state cooperation and security conditions that active hostilities eliminate. The loss of “continuity of knowledge”—the Agency’s term for uninterrupted monitoring of nuclear material—at a destroyed or damaged facility is effectively irreversible: inspectors cannot retroactively account for material that has been dispersed, looted, or destroyed in an airstrike.
The IAEA Director General can, under Article XII(C) of the IAEA Statute, report safeguards violations to the Security Council. But with Russia holding a permanent veto, and with billions of dollars of Rosatom investment at stake in Iranian nuclear infrastructure, any meaningful enforcement response is structurally blocked. The Agency is thus reduced to a witness—rather than a guardian—precisely when guardianship is most urgently needed.
Regional Proliferation Consequences
The current conflict does not unfold against a stable regional nuclear backdrop. The Barakah Nuclear Power Plant in Abu Dhabi—the Arab world’s first commercial reactor, built with South Korean technology and a multinational workforce—faces the same third-country entanglement logic as Bushehr. Saudi Arabia is advancing plans for up to 16 reactors under the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy, with negotiations ongoing with multiple potential partners. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s well-documented statement that Saudi Arabia would pursue nuclear weapons if Iran acquired them represents a proliferation risk that is directly aggravated by the current conflict.
Normalising attacks on nuclear facilities accelerates that risk. If states observe that the IAEA safeguards regime cannot protect nuclear infrastructure from military assault, the rational response is to harden, disperse, and conceal nuclear assets—behaviours that uniformly reduce transparency, complicate verification, and accelerate proliferation. The logic of deterrence, which historically has required adversaries to refrain from striking nuclear infrastructure because of the catastrophic consequences, begins to erode once that restraint is visibly abandoned by major powers.
The Precedent Problem
The implications extend well beyond the Middle East. South Asia’s nuclear rivalry, the proliferation dynamics of the Korean Peninsula, and the expanding nuclear energy sectors of Southeast Asia all represent theaters where the precedent established here will be closely studied. The India-Pakistan Agreement on the Prohibition of Attack against Nuclear Installations, signed in 1988, is the world’s only bilateral treaty explicitly prohibiting such strikes. Its logic—that nuclear facilities must be placed in a protected category even between adversarial nuclear-armed states—stands in direct contrast to what the U.S.-Israel campaign has demonstrated is now politically achievable.
The argument that technological precision makes these attacks controllable should be rejected. The Stuxnet operation against Natanz—a cyber campaign calibrated to degrade enrichment capacity without detection—demonstrated that even sophisticated covert operations can produce unintended physical consequences. A strike miscalculated by even modest margins against a facility containing enriched uranium hexafluoride can produce radiological release that spreads across borders regardless of the precision of the munition that caused it.
What Needs to Happen
The policy response must address both the immediate crisis and the structural vulnerability it has exposed. In the near term, attacks on nuclear infrastructure should cease and the IAEA should be granted unrestricted access to all affected sites. Russia, China, and other states with nationals working at Iranian facilities should formally invoke their rights under state responsibility principles and demand protection guarantees—and should make clear that the killing of their nationals at a nuclear facility would constitute a red line requiring response.
In the medium term, the UN Secretary-General and IAEA Director General should jointly document the legal violations occurring and propose a standing Security Council mechanism for addressing threats to nuclear facilities during armed conflicts. Given the veto problem, the “Uniting for Peace” procedure in the General Assembly—used during the Korean War to route around a blocked Security Council—offers a procedural avenue worth exploring. States with civilian nuclear cooperation agreements should develop joint contingency protocols for protecting their nationals in conflict zones, building the kind of third-country protection framework that might deter future strikes by raising their cost.
Longer term, there is a compelling case for a multilateral treaty extending Article 56 of Additional Protocol I to cover all categories of nuclear infrastructure—enrichment facilities, research reactors, spent fuel storage, and isotope production centres—not merely power plants. The India-Pakistan model demonstrates that even bitter adversaries can formalise this restraint. The legal template exists. What is currently missing is the political will.
Conclusion
The U.S.-Israel campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities has crossed multiple legal thresholds simultaneously: customary IHL, the UN Charter, and the normative architecture of the non-proliferation regime. The Russian personnel at Bushehr convert this from a legal problem into a potential great-power confrontation. And the precedent being set—that nuclear facilities are fair game for states with sufficient military power—risks transforming the landscape of armed conflict in ways that no precision strike can undo. Restraint is not idealism. It is the minimum requirement for a world that avoids radiological catastrophe or a war between great powers. The international law prohibiting both outcomes already exists. The question is whether the states currently violating those prohibitions will be held accountable before the damage becomes irreversible.
Dr Tahir Mahmood Azad | Executive Director, London Dialogue (LD)
London · [email protected]
© 2026 London Dialogue Ltd. Registered in England and Wales. Company No. 17133139. All rights reserved.
Tahir Azad
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