The same features that make nuclear communication difficult in good faith the technical complexity the secrecy the institutional caution become attack surfaces in a deliberate disinformation campaign and the populations most likely to seek information through informal networks during a crisis are often the least saved by official communication that is not a communications failure it is a design problem in how nuclear governance thinks about the public now i want to move from the structural vulnerabilities to what this actually looks like on the ground ray if you can jump in for a second what does um radiological and nuclear disinformation look like in practice what are the cases and why do they matter

yeah thanks for that question ian i think it's a really interesting and important one So, RNA disinformation targets many actors, often in very distinct geographic regions, but there are, I guess, two prominent examples that come to mind and I think are worth discussing today.

So let's start with the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine.

Since Russia occupied the plant in early 2022, accusations around shelling at the facility have been essentially constant, with both sides blaming the other for the incidents.

And this has led to widespread confusion amongst many audiences around what is actually going on and who is actually responsible for the strikes.

And this ambiguity is really important in nuclear discourse because disinformation thrives in uncertain situations.

And a contested nuclear site in the middle of a war is almost a perfect environment for narrative manipulation to occur.

Can radiological and nuclear disinformation actually trigger real world escalation or is that risk overstated?