nuclear-news

18 Aug 2019 My book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, published in May 2018, one year before the broadcast of the miniseries, tells the story of the disaster on the basis of recently released archival documents, which I checked against people’s diaries, memoirs and interviews. Thus, on the factual level, I can provide some answers to the accuracy of the miniseries. But inquiries I’ve received in the past few months also made me think about the bigger question of what is true in our current understanding of the Chernobyl disaster, its causes, development and consequences…….

 there’s a new Chernobylminiseries announced by the Russian television station NTV, which points a finger at CIA operatives. …….

While the effort of this miniseries to pin the blame for the disaster on the CIA strikes one as bizarre, there is little doubt that it will gain currency in Russia. ……

The critics of the HBO/Sky series point to the inaccuracies in its portrayals of the individual episodes and characters as well as misrepresentation of some of the realities of Soviet life. They are often correct. But the creators did a much better job at accurately recreating and visualising that reality than any other western and most of the post-Soviet TV productions. They grasped the big truth about the political and social conditions that caused Chernobyl better than any other film-makers before them, contributing to our common understanding of not only the story of Chernobyl but also the challenges we face together in dealing with the nuclear energy.

Today, we are witnessing a revolt against globalisation and a revival of populism and nationalism reminiscent of interwar Europe. The “America first” sentiment in the US, Brexit in the UK and Putinism in Russia are aspects of a major shift away from the universal and back to the particular. Many look at the world from ever more narrow vantage points, geographic, political, social and cultural. But nuclear disasters recognise no international, social or cultural borders, affecting people and countries that had nothing to do with a plant’s construction, and their consequences stay with us for ever –the half-life of the plutonium 239 released by Chernobyl is 24,000 years.

What’s essential about Chernobyl is that we cannot live with conflicting “truths” about the same event, created and disseminated within isolated national, social or cultural spaces. It was just such “truths” that created the monstrous Chernobyl disaster: authoritarian control over economy and society, lack of free discussion and dissemination of scientific information, and disregard for human life and health in the pursuit of allegedly higher economic or political goals, to name a few. Improving reactors and making them safer is important but not sufficient.

We must reach agreement on the political, economic and social conditions that produced disaster in the past if we are to prevent future catastrophes that may threaten the existence of humankind as a whole. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/18/spinning-conspiracy-theories-will-not-help-us-prevent-another-chernobyl-nuclear-disaster