A senior Russian official called on Thursday for the creation of a safety zone around Iran’s Russian-built Bushehr nuclear plant to prevent a major disaster, two days after a projectile struck within several hundred meters of its reactor. Alexei Likhachev, head of state nuclear corporation Rosatom, said there were 72 tons of fissile material and 210 tons of spent nuclear fuel at the site, and that any strike on it could lead to a catastrophe.For all the latest headlines follow our Google News channel online or via the app. “If an incident were to occur, it would be at least regional in scale and would affect a large number of countries in the Middle East. None of the parties to the conflict would avoid radiation exposure in the event of a serious accident at Bushehr,” Likhachev told reporters. Iran, which has been under heavy US and Israeli airstrikes since February 28, said on Tuesday that an unspecified projectile had hit the area near the