Joanna
Chris Doss wrote:
>By the way, Roy, who wrote that comment on gas and
>Belarus, has a nice article on Chernobyl on
>intelligent.ru. (http://english.intelligent.ru/ ) It's
>far too long to post, but here's the intro and ending.
>
>
>April 1986: The Big Bang
>
>No economy, least of all the Soviet one, could stand
>the strain of the Chernobyl disaster and it didnt.
>No political system that first made the disaster
>possible and then bungled the rescue effort, with
>reckless disregard for the expectations, feelings and
>very lives of millions, could stand the debacle,
>either and the Soviet system didnt. It was plain
>doomed.
>By Sergei Roy.
>
>There fell a great star from heaven, burning as it
>were a lamp&and the name of the star is called
>Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became
>wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because
>they were made bitter. Revelation 8:10,11
>
>Paradise that was Chernobyl. Chernobyl, or better
>Chornobyl, indeed means
wormwood
in Ukrainian, and
>since the nuclear explosion at that Ukrainian power
>plant the word has indeed acquired a most sinister
>connotation and an association with the gloomy
>prophetic verses of The Revelation of St. John the
>Divine. In the pre-explosion era, though, it would be
>hard to imagine a more peaceful and less sinister
>landscape.
>
>The place lies roughly on the same latitude as New
>York, with a climate to match, with mild, spring-like
>winters, delightful in spring and summer the envy of
>much of the rest of the Soviet Union, snowbound for up
>to six months a year and more. The nuclear station
>stands on the bank of the Pripyat, a beautiful river
>swiftly flowing from the marshes of Belorussia toward
>the Dnieper, densely wooded, sparsely populated, and
>well stocked with fish. Before 1917, it marked the
>boundary of the Jewish Pale, and the Jews of
>Chernobyl, a mestechko
borough
eighteen kilometers
>south-east of the then non-existent power station,
>used to eye longingly the northern bank of the river
>that was out of bounds for them.
>
>At the time of the explosion, Chernobyl, the
>administrative district center, had just 13,000
>residents. Most of the districts population, some
>50,000 people, lived in the town named after the
>river, Pripyat, three kilometers east of the nuclear
>stations sanitary zone. It was a wonderful little
>town, brand-new, quiet, clean and cozy. The air was so
>fresh and pure it almost made one drunk. If there was
>a paradise in the Soviet Union, that was it.
>
>(snip)
>
>Effect of the disaster on the Soviet system. It wasnt
>just Gorbachev, of course, but the whole nomenklatura
>setup that suffered a severe, self-inflicted moral
>blow due to its instinctive reaction to save its own
>and to hell with the beloved workers and peasants, not
>to mention the intelligentsia. The conduct of the
>Ukrainian top nomenklatura was particularly
>disgusting. All of a sudden there were quite a few
>empty desks in Kiev schools: that was the nomenklatura
>sending their children away while keeping the lid on
>information about the disaster. The warning to stock
>up on potassium iodide tablets went to the Kiev
>nomenklatura only: that was the Fourth Department of
>the Health Ministry taking care of its charges, the
>Party-and-state brass. The Ukrainian Party bosses,
>having packed off their own offspring to safety,
>calmly allowed the traditional May Day parades and
>celebrations to proceed, smiling benignly on thousands
>of children marching past on a sunny spring day, amid
>flowers, music and flags, through heavily contaminated
>streets. It was later widely commented on that
>Ukraines First Secretary Vladimir Shcherbitsky kept
>glancing at his watch, between smiles and hand-waving,
>probably calculating the dose of radioactivity he was
>getting[xxiii].
>
>>From then on, hatred for the ruling nomenklatura among
>the masses soared. It was probably in those days that
>the jingle, so often chanted later at mass rallies,
>was made up:
>
> Pust zhivyot KPSS
>
> Na Chernobylskoy AES!
>
>
>
> Long live the Communist Party
>
> at Chernobyl Power Plant!
>
>A couple of years later, all sorts of damning facts
>about the antecedents of the disaster surfaced in the
>press. Some of the plant's construction defects were
>said to be due to the universal practice of doing
>things in a hurry in order to report to the Party
>superiors completion of construction by some
>red-letter day, like November 7, the anniversary of
>the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. True, plant manager
>Bryukhanov insisted later that not one of the
>Chernobyl plants units had been commissioned earlier
>than planned and he may have been telling the truth:
>even releasing certain facts to the press was yet
>another move in the cover-up campaign to conceal the
>deficiencies of all nuclear reactors of the Chernobyl
>type, not just the one in Chernobyl. According to
>Bryukhanov again, a group of independent experts
>concluded that there were 32 major flaws in Chernobyl
>type reactors:
Our staff made one mistake I will
>admit that. For this, we got ten years [in the labor
>camps]. And for 32 errors nothing!
[xxiv]
>
>Valery Legasov, the prominent nuclear physicist I
>mentioned above, committed suicide on the anniversary
>of the Chernobyl disaster, after numerous unsuccessful
>attempts to convince the top leadership of the threat
>the RBMKs posed, insisting that unless certain
>measures to change the design were swiftly taken, the
>world could expect more Chernobyls in the near future.
>
>
>I may sound inhuman, but I sometimes catch myself
>thinking it was a pity that some
nuclear
>academicians had not followed suit. But they wouldnt,
>of course, considering the sort of callousness they
>displayed after the disaster. During the May 6 press
>conference mentioned above, Academician A.
>Petrosyants, chairman of the USSR State Committee for
>the Use of Atomic Energy, said something that a
>dogcatcher might find tactless and unfeeling:
Science
>demands sacrifices!
[xxv] The countrys highest-paid
>official, President of the USSR Academy of Sciences
>Anatoly Aleksandrov, who headed the designers of the
>RBMK reactor, and Yefim Slavsky, minister for
medium
>machine building
(a code name for the nuclear weapons
>industry), were not much better: at a Politburo
>meeting immediately after the blast, they both told
>the high assembly that
nothing terrible has happened,
>things like that occurred at industrial reactors
>youd drink a glass or two of vodka, have a good
>snack, and no consequences at all!
[xxvi]
>
>According to some estimates, the Chernobyl disaster
>cost the country, in all the years since it happened,
>about $200 billion, although Gorbachev would have us
>believe that
the liquidation of the consequences of
>the disaster cost 14 billion rubles, and then a
>further several billion
[xxvii]. No economy, least of
>all the Soviet one, could stand the strain and it
>didn't. No political system that first made the
>disaster possible and then bungled the rescue effort,
>with reckless disregard for the expectations, feelings
>and very lives of millions, could stand the debacle,
>either and the Soviet system didn't. It was plain
>doomed.
>
>
>
>Nu, zayats, pogodi!
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
>http://mail.yahoo.com
>___________________________________
>http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>