The Easter egg was still lying on the kitchen table, unpainted, because the children had been too tired yesterday and I too distracted for us to finish it. And now it lay there, this pale, dull thing, looking like something waiting to be inscribed, just like this Tuesday that's coming tomorrow, which already has a name on Truth Social: "Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one." Power Plant Day. Bridge Day. Although "bridge day" is actually a nice German word, one that sounds like leisure time, like a Friday squeezed between a holiday and the weekend, like a small, harmless gap in the calendar. But nothing here is harmless, nothing is squeezed in; this is just a deadline ticking away like a fuse, and at the end, according to the announcement from Washington, there will be hell.
I went outside because you have to go outside on days like these, because the apartment becomes too small for what's brewing, and because the streets pretend they know nothing. Past the cathedral, where the Easter bells still echoed (or was I imagining it?), towards the island city, across the lower bridge, which has stood there for centuries and is simply a bridge, not a military objective. It was Easter Monday, the city was silent, and my phone displayed the message: “Open the F****** Strait, you crazy b*******, or you'll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” This is what the President of the United States of America writes on Easter Sunday. Praise be to Allah. You rub your eyes, but it doesn't go away.
The facts, insofar as one can still call them facts on such a day: On February 28, the US and Israel launched surprise attacks on Iran. Khamenei was killed, and Iran responded with missiles at Israel, US bases, and Gulf states, closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil trade normally flows. Since then, hundreds of tankers, container ships, and freighters have been stuck. Trump issued ultimatums, postponed them, issued new ones, postponed those as well, and now it's Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, Wednesday at 2 a.m. here, while we sleep. Or rather, while we're not sleeping. Then, if Iran doesn't open the strait, power plants, bridges, and energy facilities are supposed to fall. And—this is the point at which I briefly lost my breath on the bridge over the Regnitz River—possibly Bushehr as well.
Bushehr. Iran's only active nuclear power plant, built on the Gulf coast, was originally begun by German companies (in 1975; West Germany was happy to help with nuclear technology at the time, given its expertise), then completed by the Russians, and went online in 2011. One reactor, 1,000 megawatts, thousands of kilograms of nuclear material. Four times, says Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi, the plant has been shelled since the start of the war. The last time, on Saturday, a projectile struck an adjacent building, killing a security guard. Radiation levels, the IAEA reported, have not yet increased.
Is bombing a nuclear power plant a war crime? The answer, as is so often the case in international law, is a qualified yes, which requires reading three times before it becomes clear. Article 56 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1977 explicitly prohibits attacks on nuclear power plants—even if they are military targets—if such an attack could unleash dangerous forces and cause heavy civilian casualties. Under certain conditions, according to Article 85, paragraph 3, such an attack can be considered a war crime. More than one hundred international law experts recently warned in an open letter that the threatened strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure could constitute war crimes. The ICRC, the Red Cross, put it this way: War against vital infrastructure is war against civilians.
However—and this is where things get legally murky—the US never ratified the First Additional Protocol. They signed it, yes, in 1977, but never ratified it, and to this day they maintain the position that an object that makes an “effective contribution to the conduct of the war or to the maintenance of the enemy’s ability to wage war” is a legitimate military target. It is this phrase—"war-sustaining capability"—that fits like a passe-partout through every lock of international law and that allows, in principle, the bombing of anything that generates electricity. US Ambassador Mike Waltz declared in March that attacks on nuclear power plants were “not off the table.” Not off the table. How could they be? There’s nothing left on the table that hasn’t already been knocked off.
Meanwhile, I had passed Schlenkerla, where tourists were still drinking smoked beer as if the world were alright, and I thought about Osirak. In 1981, Israel bombed the Iraqi research reactor Osirak; fourteen out of sixteen bombs hit their target, and in two minutes the Iraqi nuclear program was (allegedly) history. Ten Iraqi soldiers died, along with a French technician. The world condemned the attack, the UN Security Council condemned it, and ten years later, US Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said the Israelis had done "excellent work." But Osirak was a research reactor, not operational, not filled. Bushehr is a different caliber. Bushehr is online, full, and hot.
What happens if an active reactor is hit? IAEA Director General Grossi explained it to the Security Council last summer, when Israel attacked Iran in the Twelve-Day War: A direct hit on Bushehr could lead to a "very high release of radioactivity," with "major consequences" far beyond Iran's borders. Cesium-137, the dangerous isotope, would be spread by wind and water, potentially contaminating soil, food, and drinking water sources for decades. Evacuation orders would have to be issued over a radius of several hundred kilometers, including in neighboring countries. Iodine tablets. Food restrictions. The Gulf states—Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE—have hardly any groundwater; they desalinate seawater, but desalination plants are not designed to filter out radioactive material. Qatar's Prime Minister put it succinctly: A catastrophe at Bushehr would affect "all of us." Araghchi, Iran's foreign minister, put it even more bluntly: "The radioactive fallout will end life in the capitals of the Gulf states, not in Tehran." Bushehr is closer to Kuwait than to the Iranian capital. The geography of radiation knows no borders and no alliances.
And there it was again, that word: hell. Trump uses it as a threat, almost as a promise, as a rhetorical club he swings like a golf club. "All Hell will reign down on them." But hell is also a theological term, and perhaps, especially now, especially at Easter, we should take it literally. In both the Christian and Islamic understanding, hell is not a place one can prepare for someone—it is a state one enters when one crosses the line of human decency. When one does things that cannot be undone. The cesium-137 that escapes from a damaged reactor has a half-life of thirty years. Thirty years is a generation. That's a child born today who will spend their entire life so far in a contaminated world before even half of the poison has decayed.
I was standing on the Upper Bridge, the most beautiful spot in the city (in my opinion), looking down at the Regnitz River, which seemed to be in no hurry. My phone showed another message: Rosatom, Russia's nuclear corporation, had evacuated its 198 employees from Bushehr. Buses, heading towards the Armenian border. If the Russians are leaving, I thought, if the Russians are pulling their own people out of a power plant they themselves built, then that's no longer a diplomatic signal, it's a seismographic one. Then someone is expecting the worst.
Iran's parliamentary speaker, Ghalibaf, wrote on X that "nothing can be achieved" with "war crimes." The Iranian mission to the UN called the threat to deliberately destroy civilian infrastructure a violation of international law and urged the international community to take action. "Tomorrow will be too late," it said. Tomorrow. So that's today. Or the day after. Depending on which ultimatum is currently in effect—because that, too, is part of the particular drama of this conflict—the deadlines shift. First 48 hours, then five days, then ten, now Tuesday, 8 p.m. The threat stretches like an accordion, but the instrument always plays the same note.
A pensioner approached me, his dog on a leash, and said, "Beautiful weather today." I nodded, and he was right, the weather was beautiful, the Regnitz River was sparkling, and over Bamberg there was no smoke, no radiation, no ultimatum, just a sky that was blue, as if it hadn't heard a thing. But the Strait of Hormuz is thirty-three kilometers wide. The territorial waters of Iran and Oman overlap completely there; there is no neutral corridor. And Bushehr lies on the coast, at sea level, and the wind blows southeast, toward the Gulf, toward drinking water, toward everything.
At home, the egg was still there. Unpainted. I put it back in the fridge because it suddenly seemed strange to me to be painting something so thin-shelled while elsewhere someone was debating whether to use a bomb to puncture a casing containing cesium-137. Or perhaps that was precisely the point of Easter: to hold something fragile in your hand and decide not to drop it.
Outside, it was getting dark. Tuesday is coming.
S.
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