In the wake of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, a photo (here, here, and here) allegedly showing the situation of the Nur Khan air force base situated in Chaklala in Pakistan after India targeted it during this conflict is doing the rounds on social media. In the viral photo, we can see the insides of a building with a control room panel in a deserted state. We will verify this claim through this article.
Claim: Photo shows the situation of the Nur Kahan air base in Pakistan after India targeted it in the May 2025 Operation Sindoor.
Fact: This photo shows a control room of the nuclear reactor 4, at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, where an explosion occurred during a test on 26 April 1986. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the claim, we performed a keyword search on the internet to find visuals of the damage caused by the Indian air strikes at Pakistan’s Nur Khan air base located in Chaklala, Rawalpindi. This search led us to a few news reports (here and here), which showed the satellite images of the destruction caused by the Indian strikes. These images are similar to the one presented by Air Marshal A K Bharti during a press conference on Operation Sindoor on 11 May 2025.
However, none of these reports or official press releases contained the visuals of the Nur Khan air base from the inside. We did not find any official reports from Pakistan, either, which showed the damage caused by Indian strikes inside the Nur Khan air base.
Therefore, to learn more about the viral photo, we performed a reverse image search and found many similar photos from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant site. We found these photos on stock photo websites like Adobe Stock, Alamy, Flickr, news reports and and image sharing websites like Imgur (here, here, here, and here). Based on these, the viral photo shows the control room panel of Chernobyl’s reactor four.
A CNN news report from February 2020 contains an image from the Chernobyl power plant, which is a wider shot of the control room seen in the viral photo. You can see the similarities between the viral photo and this one in the collage below.
Additionally, we also found a few YouTube videos shot inside the control room of the Chernobyl power plant’s reactor number four. These provided a closer look at the control room panel, which matches the panel boards, ceiling, switches, etc., seen in the viral photo (here, here, and here).
A devastating accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the early hours of 26 April 1986 during a test in reactor four (here, here, here, and here). This is often called the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power generation.
To sum up, a photo of a control panel at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is falsely shared as the state of Pakistan’s Nur Khan air base after India’s attack during Operation Sindoor.
