DTNS Special Report
It was the campaign promise that shook the world.
On January 31, 2024, then-presidential candidate Neina Arana told supporters that Milintica should restart its long-dormant nuclear weapons program. “Milintica must do everything it can to defend itself. This includes the development of nuclear weapons for deterrent purposes,” Arana said at the time. While the promise alarmed many both within and outside Milintica, it was mostly dismissed with a comforting assertion: It’s not like she’ll actually win or anything.
Almost a year later, candidate Arana is now President Arana. And nothing seems off the table anymore.
Milintica has not officially pursued nuclear weapons since the Great War. The government of Milintica at the time, fearing a planned Xiomeran invasion, was searching for anything that could fend off the Imperial menace. A desperate last-ditch nuclear weapons program was launched, based around the Karauna I and II reactors outside the Milintican capital Huānoch. The reactors were originally constructed in 1965 and 1966 as a power supply for the Milintican capital. Milintica’s existing power grid was fizzling under the weight of under-investment and aging equipment. A set of shiny new nuclear reactors was meant to light up Huānoch. Karauna I and II were meant to show the world that Milintica could harness the power of the atom to the will of socialism. The reactors were originally intended to be part of multiple nuclear power plants around Milintica, as part of the government’s Five-Year Modern Power Plan. But when the Great War started, ambitious projects quickly fell by the wayside. Milintica’s government instead saw Karauna I and II as a means of salvation. The reactors would, in theory, provide Milintica with the fuel needed to jumpstart a nuclear weapons program until the country could build its own dedicated breeder reactor for the program.
But as Xiomera’s fortunes during the Great War faltered, and the threat of invasion fell away, the Milintican government soon found its nascent nuke program to be both very expensive and far more complicated than imagined. Sporadic efforts continued after the war ended, but by 1977, the program had been effectively shelved.
With Neina Arana threatening to restart the program, however, the attention of the world was once again drawn to the tiny country’s previous nuclear efforts. And for those who looked, they would not like what they saw.
Milintica’s efforts to gain the bomb would take years or even decades to realize, assuming that Xiomeran bombers didn’t simply level whatever location Milintica was using to work on said program. As experts began to look at Milintica’s nuclear aspirations post-Arana win, however, they would rediscover what had once been the shining technological jewel on Huānoch’s crown.
The Karauna Power Plant, stunningly, was still chugging along, over fifty years after it had first powered up. Karauna I reactor is in a state of extended shutdown, being beyond the abilities of even Milintican improvisation to keep running. But Karauna II reactor is still providing power to the people of Huānoch. And both reactors still have their complement of rods of highly enriched uranium. What the reactors do not have, according to the last international teams allowed to visit Karauna in 2023, is anything resembling modern technology to control the reactors. Most of the technology at Karauna is a hodgepodge of modern (or somewhat modern) equipment slapped onto the existing sixty-year-old systems. Given the country’s struggling finances and years of isolation before the tenure of President Matōchmizalo, maintenance of those systems was also highly improvised, according to observers. One report declared Karauna “an accident waiting to happen.”
The most alarming thing observed about Karauna, however, was the lack of security. In theory, the site is guarded by Milintica’s National Police. Observers noted, however, that security was understaffed on many occasions and completely absent at others. A single perimeter fence separates Karauna from the surrounding capital. Doors and gates were secured with keys and padlocks, rather than modern security systems. “It wouldn’t take a spy to get in here – a sufficiently motivated petty criminal with a lockpick could probably do it,” one observer noted. The observer added, “It’s a complete miracle that Karauna hasn’t lost nuclear material yet. And I do say yet.”
The Milintican government had, belatedly, been grappling with the danger posed by Karauna and trying to address it. According to former officials with Matōchmizalo’s government, they had been planning to ask their UCS partners for help securing and modernizing Karauna to eliminate its dangers.
But then Matōchmizalo lost his election. Neina Arana took over, and killed those efforts. Her decision to secure Milintica behind a new iron curtain now also blocks Karauna from any meaningful efforts to modernize and secure it.
The fact that Karauna could fail just because it is old, outdated and poorly maintained is bad enough. But the possibility of terrorists or criminal elements gaining access to Karauna’s aging and insecure facilities, with the nuclear fuel they possess, is far worse. Milintica may not have been able to make a bomb from Karauna yet, but that doesn’t mean someone else couldn’t.
And even if all those possibilities somehow never materialize, if Arana follows through with plans to use Karauna to pursue a bomb, the outcome could still be terrible. Xiomeran leaders have already warned that they will take whatever measures they deem fit to make sure Milintica doesn’t get the bomb. With Huenya already wielding a nuclear club over Tlālacuetztla to thwart Imperial ambitions, it is extremely likely that Xiomera would stop at nothing to prevent another nation in Caxcana from gaining that ability. If Xiomera responds to a relaunched Milintican nuclear program by bombing Karauna, the consequences could be severe for Huānoch, the rest of Milintica, and Caxcana as a whole.