> Two, a gun to the head of Europe. They could threaten to destroy the containment, and/or to bomb the reactor building to aerosolise as much radioactive material as possible.
If they wanted to go that extreme, they always had the option of just launching nukes. Capturing the reactor and blowing the sarcophagus just seems like a lot of needless extra steps.
Maybe I read too much scifi, but can't nukes be intercepted in key locations? They might be able to land them in more remote places, but wouldn't hitting cities be difficult? I was under the impression developed nations have missile interception technologies. But yeah, I've read books not based in reality and watched some netflix in my days, so I could be in fantasy land. Kind of sobering to write this out and realize how clueless I am.
The US and Russia long had a treaty which prohibited the development of anti-ballistic missile systems with narrow exceptions. While the treaty agreement effectively ended in 2002, it did effectively stop most ABM work in both countries for an extended period of time. Further, the problem has proven to be exceptionally difficult. The Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as "Star Wars," was an effort towards a comprehensive defense against nuclear ICBMs that was famously declared to be beyond the realm of the possible by some technical groups. While US ABM work as resumed in earnest over the last couple of decades or so, it remains an extremely hard problem and progress has been slow. The prominent GMD system, for example, has the ability to counter only "tens" of warheads (and at tremendous expense, having to fire many interceptors per inbound missile in order to raise the probability of success). Other systems like Aegis are generally even more limited.
So while various countries do possess ABM systems with varying levels of efficacy, in general we could expect only a very small portion of inbound ICBMs to be successfully intercepted... if any. These types of systems have consistently under-performed expectations as field conditions prove to be more challenging than expected, and that's with limited knowledge of the countermeasures an adversary like Russia might employ.
Aside from the numbers game, ICBMs used to be the fastest way to deliver a warhead, with the obvious drawback that anyone watching the horizon can see it coming from half a world away.
Nuclear warheads have been further miniaturized since the cold war, it is now possible to fit them into cruise missiles.
> The deployment of Kalibr missiles, long-range, low-flying, capable of carrying conventional or nuclear warheads, available in land-attack, anti-ship and anti-submarine variants, was said to have altered the military balance in Europe and potentially compromised the NATO missile defence system under construction in Europe. [0]
There's also the rumored/propagandized hypersonic, nuclear powered cruise missiles (skyfall [1]) that are meant to defeat missile defense and circumvent MAD by enabling undetected first strike.
Plausible deniability is a good reason not to use nukes. They could have a military accident, or blame a saboteur for some sort of weapons cache exploding in-situ and claim it was not intentional.
If they wanted to go that extreme, they always had the option of just launching nukes. Capturing the reactor and blowing the sarcophagus just seems like a lot of needless extra steps.