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I remember that once, after the Chernobyl breakdown in 1986, the Soviet authorities after the denialism Initially they were forced to tell the world the truth −although they were still telling it in parts−, the state agency TASS, when the battle was still going on at the nuclear plant itself to prevent the radioactive lava from reaching the groundwater, began to discuss the case of Three Mile Island (1979) –a partial meltdown of a reactor– and other nuclear accidents in the United States.
I remember that even in Poland, Trybuna Luduthe official newspaper of the socialist party (PZPR) – perhaps in a tactic realignment with the Kremlin after an initial clash when the Polish authorities, like much else on the planet, became aware of the Chernobyl disaster on their own without having been informed from Moscow – prioritized the news about the recent French nuclear test on the Mururoa atoll (I remember that it was the first time I heard this name).
even though we were sister nations
, the Soviets did not tell the Polish authorities anything. The head of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, arriving at work in the morning on Monday, April 28 – two days after the explosion – discovered a report from the monitoring station in the northwest of the country according to which the radiation in the air suddenly increased 550 thousand times (sic!). –Atomic bomb!
he thought –we were still in the cold War and the radiological services were oriented to this–, but the analysis showed that the elements, products of the decay of uranium, did not come from a bomb, but from a reactor. Which one? Where?: Chernobyl.
Chernobyl
is the name of the worst nuclear disaster so far (years later Fukushima was the second). The number of its victims surely exceeds the official figure of barely 31
and even the estimated number of “4 thousand ‘related deaths’”, perhaps exceeding 100 thousand. But at the same time – and here is a grain of truth in the old and instrumental socialist propaganda – atomic bomb tests across the planet have released up to a thousand times more radioactive material in recent decades (sic!).
No one ever followed or studied where the isotopes of more than 500 nuclear charges detonated in the atmosphere went and ended up (the same applies to underground and ocean tests). No one looked at the clouds generated by them the way we looked in real time at the radioactive cloud coming from northern Ukraine (more than 70 percent of it fell with the rain, artificially induced by Soviet aircraft, over Belarus; the second most affected nation was Poland). Not to mention that the greatest nuclear horror deliberately planned and carried out by human beings -the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs- was not the result of any totalitarian ideology as some would surely have wanted (there is always room for more communist crimes
); a democracy did. It was devised by Roosevelt and ordered by Truman. Not Stalin or Khrushchev.
I remember that Sven Lindqvist – an extraordinary Swedish journalist and writer – in his excellent terra nullis (2005) recalled that only the British tests on Australian Maralinga left scattered amounts of plutonium that irradiated the region for the next 280,000 years and that only the weapons tested there would obliterate the entire planet in an instant. But, of course, let’s continue talking only about the USSR.
Today, with the war in Ukraine – the very Ukraine of Chernobyl – we have seen not only the nuclear power plants under fire (Chernobyl and Zaporizhia), but the prospect of using nuclear weapons closer than during the war itself. cold War. There is nothing remotely resembling the anti-nuclear movement (EP Thompson). Even the doctrine of mutual assured destruction
(MAD) already seems to be a distant history not only thanks to Putin, ready, according to himself, to drop the bomb first, but also to the United States, which, as Mike Davis – an American Marxist theorist who died a few months ago – has rightly noted, with their megalomania and lack of vision for the future do not imagine any other alternative for their decline than a new race − and a possible conflict − nuclear with Russia and China ( Thanatos Triumphantin: Sidecar/New Left Review7/3/22).
In the last sentence of what turned out to be his last text, Davis, in a gesture of something that could only be seen as anger or despair – although he had a reputation for never lose hope
– paid tribute to political assassins by barely mentioning their names: Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and Sholem Schwarzbard (he obviously believed that times are truly desperate). I remember that Ulyanov –Lenin’s brother– ended up on the gallows after the frustrated attack on the narodniki to Tsar Alexander III and that one of his collaborators was Bronisław Piłsudski, brother of Józef, the head of the post-1918 Polish state. I remember that Berkman – Emma Goldman’s partner – tried to assassinate an American industrialist during a workers’ rebellion in Pennsylvania and that Schwarzbard shot Simon Petliura, the nationalist head of a failed independent Ukrainian state, in broad daylight on a Parisian street. −and at the time a great ally of J. Piłsudski–, a nefarious anti-Semite responsible for multiple pogroms during the war with the Bolsheviks (and for which Schwarzbard was later acquitted by the French court). I remember and I will remember until someone first drops the bomb.
