What if shelling breaches a reactor at Zaporizhzhia?
A shelling-induced containment breach and radiological release at Zaporizhzhia is a geopolitical tail — VIX explodes and the risk-parity deleveraging cascade dumps Nasdaq, S&P and high-beta crypto. The pricing template is the 2025 Israel-Iran war scare and Chernobyl-style contamination panic. Forward angle: unlike a pure financial shock, a cross-border radiological event injects a NATO-escalation premium, so the equity drawdown could overshoot the model and bid gold/bonds harder than the cascade shows.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the Tail risk horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Shelling causes a containment breach and radiological release at Zaporizhzhia, spreading contamination across the region. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.