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432 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 2019
Chernobyl was not a single event but was instead a point on a continuum; the radioactive contamination of Polesia lasted more than three decades. Chernobyl territory was already saturated with radioactive isotopes from atomic bomb tests before architects drew up plans for the nuclear power plant. And, after Chernobyl as before Chernobyl, the drumbeat of nuclear accidents continued at two dozen other Ukrainian nuclear power installations and missile sites. Sixty-six nuclear accidents occurred in Ukraine alone in the year after Chernobyl blew. More nuclear mishaps transpired after the Soviet Union collapsed, including the fires in the Red Forest in 2017.Kate Brown has been tracking the 20th century’s glow for quite a while. Her first book, published in 2004, The Biography of No Place, winner of the American Historical Association’s International European History Prize for Best Book, looked at the Ukraine-Poland borderlands that Chernobyl had made uninhabitable. Her 2013 book, Plutopia, illuminated two towns, one in the US, one in the USSR, that were dedicated to producing plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, tracking the impact of these places on the environment, the residents, and the public’s right to know. Now, in 2019, She is back at it with Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. If you are of a survivalist bent, you will be disappointed. Sorry, no blueprints. I expect the inspiration for the book’s title can be found in a piece she wrote for Eurozine, Dear Comrades! Chernobyl's mark on the Anthropocene. Brown reports:
Calling Chernobyl an “accident” is a broom that sweeps away the larger story. Conceiving of the events that contaminated the Pripyat Marshes as discrete occurrences blur the fact that they are connected. Instead of an accident, Chernobyl might be better conceived of as an acceleration on a time line of destruction or as an exclamation point in a chain of toxic exposures that restructured the landscape, bodies, and politics.
In August 1986, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health issued five thousand copies of a pamphlet addressed to “residents of population points exposed to radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl atomic station. The pamphlet begins with assurances:This is not to say that governments had had no cause to do so before then. There was a lot of denial before and most of the denial remains. A more useful manual would have provided instructions for when and where to catch the bus that was going to take residents to new homes, far away. Well, some got to leave. Far too many were stuck soaking up the rays, just not from the sun.
Dear Comrades! Since the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, there has been a detailed analysis of the radioactivity of the food and territory of your population point. The results of the investigation show that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children. The main portion of radioactivity has decayed. The composition of the radioactivity in water, air, forest and shrubs is tens of times lower than the established norms. For this reason, you have no reason to limit your consumption of local agricultural produce. If villagers persisted in reading beyond the first pages, they found that the pamphlet’s confident tone trails off, like the telling of an unfunny joke: [offering a list of things they should not eat, and other actions they should take to minimize risk] The pamphlet is actually a survival manual, one that is unique in human history. There had been nuclear accidents before which left people living on territory contaminated with harmful levels of nuclear fallout, but never before Chernobyl had a state been forced to admit to the problem and issue a manual for the new reality.
…in 1972…a team of scientists from a closed military research lab tried to use a nuclear bomb to put out an underground gas fire in a pipeline near Kharkiv. The gas fire raged out of control for the better part of a year. Arriving to help, physicists from a top-secret bomb lab drilled a hole down two kilometers next to the burning gas well and planted a 3.8 kiloton nuclear bomb in the shaft. Soviet bomb designers had detonated peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs) in other parts of the USSR to smother gas fires. They were confident that this secret “Operation Torch” would work. [All went as planned, for about twenty seconds.] And then something went awry. A scorching jet mixed with earth and stone from the gas well shot up improbably high. The blaze rose higher than any skyscraper to pierce the summer sky. A minute later, witnesses ducked from the force of a blisteringly hot shock wave. Radiation levels in nearby communities climbed to harmful levels.Oopsy. One of the larger surprises is the difficulty scientists had in establishing control populations for studies. Residents of the northern hemisphere (primarily) had been on the receiving end of fallout from hundreds of nuclear bomb tests in the 50s and 60s. (There have been over two thousand overall) Radioactive materials are pervasive enough that when future scientists study our era, they will be able to date the specimens they find by the presence or absence of radioactive isotopes, just as scientists were able to determine when the incoming asteroid ended the Cretaceous by coating the planet with a layer of iridium. If you find yourself in ”the zone” you might want to get out ASAP. The Zone of Alienation sounds like psycho-babble about an inability to connect with other people, but it was the 30-kilometer circle around Chernobyl that was deemed unsafe for habitation. You’ll learn about The Third Department a super-secret government agency that focused on dealing with radiation issues.
The wool workers did not know that picking up the radioactive bales was like embracing an X-ray machine while it was turned on.There is a lot of information in Manual for Survival, and it will not help you sleep at night. We have been led to believe that nuclear power plant accidents are black swan events. Kate Brown reminds us that this is not the case. Just at Chernobyl, there had been over a hundred incidents before the final blow. Since 1964 there were accidents every year in Soviet nuclear reactors that caused death, injury, or released radioactivity. She makes the case that casualty reports from such happenings are certain to understate the long-term mortality and health impacts. It is in the interest of those operating such plants, and often their governments, to see to it that thorough examinations of nuclear accident aftermaths are either not done, or are controlled, and the dissemination of findings seriously constrained. More significantly, she uses the Chernobyl accident as a beginning point for talking about the existence of radioactive pollution across the planet.
What happened was that people I talked to gave me more questions and insights. You have to weigh all of your sources and crosscheck them. You can have an archival source and cite it, but it may not be right. And someone can be drawing from their memory, and he or she might be wrong, and memories are often wrong. But using both sources to cross-reference one another is an effective way to get a richer story than if you just use one source.