Western man and Chernobyl

 

There’s a complex, a Western man’s complex: it happens when Western M. touches the Soviet Union.

In that moment, the Soviet Union becomes evil. And, on the rebound, the West becomes good.

That moment is a royal intellectual screwing that has a number of effects. For instance, it screwed up the tv series, Chernobyl.

I did not see this series when it came out. For one thing, Masha Gessen’s scathing review made it clear that many of the choices of the director, or scriptwriter, were wrong. Although Gessen concedes that the people who put together the choreography, the look of the scenery, were astonishingly good. Russians who saw the show and had lived in the Soviet Union in the 1980s recognized the wall paper, the dresses, the haircuts, the halls – everything. Still, she was scathing about what the producers did not know about homo sovieticus in the 1980s, the children of the Soviet Baby boomers or the Soviet greatest generation.

Finally I decided to watch it. And I found it quite horrifying – a horror docudrama. I have been converted, by my son, into a horror film fan, and rode that dimension through the true stitching together of jumpscares, and even spotted a final girl – the pregnant wife of one of the firefighters. This I loved.

However, the series loops the horror show around the Soviet Union, as though the one unique experience of horrendous design and execution of nuclear power and its materials were a Soviet matter.

At the same time that the series was first aired, the Virginia Quarterly Review, not the kind of print press one expects journalism from, published an excellent article, Cold War Hot Mess, by Lois Parshly, about the “cleanup” so called of the Hanford Plutonium plant. One finds, there, the same combination of secrecy, cover-up, stupidity and the refusal to inform victims of radiation that they have been laced with a carcinogenic destiny.

The Chernobyl accident, as Kate Brown has shown in Manuel for the Future: a Chernobyl guide for the future, had wideranging results that were covered up not just by the Soviets, but by the “West” and the UN, which had many vital interests in keeping the lid on the casualty count. For instance, France, the UK and the US, for twenty years, sponsored above the ground nuke tests that put 30 times more curies into the atmosphere than Chernobyl did. This in itself is a measure of how bad Chernobyl was – but it is also a measure of how unmeasured the effect of those tests remain.

In David Thompson’s book, “In Nevada: The Land, The People, God, and Chance," there’s a movie anecdote – which you would expect, since Thompson is a movie critic and the one man author of a movie encyclopedia – about The Conqueror, a John Wayne flick financed by Howard Hughes and shot in St. George, Utah in 1955. St. George happened to be in the alley through which mucho radioactivity from those above ground tests passed. Hughes had soil dug up form the site to be used later for in studio productionAnd the crew, cast, director and others were thus exposed to the substances unleashed by the department of War and blessed by the scientists hired by the department of war, who have, since the dropping of Big Boy, spent seventy years downplaying the dangers of radiation. Thompson points out that, out of the 221 people working on the film, 91 got cancer. This isn’t that surprising. In St. George, deformed babies became known as sacrifice babies – sacrificed to national defense. The leukemia rate was 2.5 times higher than the national average – but cancers were only one of the kind of low grade, life sucking maladies that afflicted the community, and that atomic energy scientists are quick to label psychosomatic – as in the notoriously sloppy WHO/AEIC report on Chernobyl.

To read Kate Brown on the WHO's method for deciding on the biological casualty rate at Chernobyl is to see a falsehood gain traction. The era of "post-truth" is rooted in the era of Cold War truthiness - an incremental approach to the truth, under the TOP SECRET label. If you continue to lie to a population about things that affect them vitally, at a certain point people will begin to disbelieve the authorities about other vital things - hence, the COVID vaciine phenomenon.

During a period from the late 40s to the late 70s, the War Department’s scientific community was both experimenting with weapons designed to kill millions and denying that the weapons produced anything that would harm Americans living around the places where those weapons were exploded. Sometimes, just to check, populations were exposed to radiation on purpose – the Defense Department in 1991 admitted that it had done about 4,000 experiments exposing humans to radioactivity between 1944 to 1974, according to Eduardo Goncalves article on the ‘secret nuclear war’ in the Ecologist in 2001. Carole Gallagher, in her photo book about the victims of the bomb tests, quotes a great AEC memo about communities in the path of fallout – they were labeled the “low use segment of the population.” The Conqueror was the more unfortunate in that it mixed low use people with valuable people, including John Wayne – who of course died of cancer. As any scientist would be quick to point out, John Wayne smoked. In any population in the fifties, there are going to be people who die of cancer anyway, statistically. It isn’t science to hide behind that fact, it is politics. But the War Department’s scientists hid behind that fact for fifty years. In Goncalves article, he quotes an Army medic, Van Brandon, who said that the army routinely kept two sets of records of radioactive readings in the fallout paths, one set to show that nobody received an elevated level of radiation, the other set to show how high that elevated level actually was. “That set was brought in a locked briefcase every morning.”

In the 50s, to be fair, not a lot was known about chronic illness. It certainly wasn’t known that one could be infected with a disease that would only appear thirty years later. Now it is fifty years later, and there is a lot of information that is not going to be showing up in any newspaper headlines any time soon – after all, the congressional investigations about the nuclear testing ‘accidents’ were concluded in the 80s. News and disease have a different time frame. So we haven’t seen a lot of publicity given to this report by Steven L. Simon, Andre Bouville and Charles E. Land in this January’s American Scientist, "Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests and Cancer Risks." Yet there should be, not only for what it says but for what it doesn't say. The report goes the partial hang-out route, to quote Nixon, diminishing by segregating -- for instance, by concentrating on cancer, the authors can ignore the immune system breakdowns associated with radioactivity, and never ask if there is any meshing between these two results of radiation poisoning. It bases its statistics on reports of radioactive readings after the tests without even a note to say that some of those readings are, to say the least, disputed – and that we know the Department of War has changed its story about certain of the most notorious tests -- for instance the one on July 5, 1957, in which, in the immediate aftermath of the test, some 2,000 soldiers were ordered into ground zero – while the becqueral count was off the Geiger counter - and this was after these soldiers were exposed, as was standard practice, by being put in trenches some mile from the explosion. Afterwards, soldiers reported that they could do things you only see in horror movies – like pull their teeth from their mouth. All of which reports would get them trundled into the psych wards are VA hospitals. And none of which is reflected in the notes in the American Scientist, which are enlivened by some maps I'd like to figure out how to post.

This is from the article:

"The cancer risks are, of course, the most publicized of the spectrum of ills resulting from scientific carelessness about exploding big dangerous toys to see what would happen. The less publicized of those ills is immune deficiencies of various kinds.

“In 1997, NCI conducted a detailed evaluation of dose to the thyroid glands of U,S, residents from 1-131 in fallout from tests in Nevada. In a related activity, we evaluated the risks of thyroid cancer from that exposure and estimated that about 49,000 fallout-related cases might occur in the United States,

almost all of them among persons who were under age 20 at some time during the period 1951-57, with 95-percent uncertainty limits of 11,300 and 212,000. The estimated risk may be compared with some 400,000 lifetime thyroid cancers expected in the same population in the absence of any fallout exposure.

Accounting for thyroid exposure from global fallout, which was distributed fairly uniformly over the entire United States, might increase the estimated excess by 10 percent, from 49,000 to 54,000. Fallout-related risks for thyroid cancer are likely to exceed those for any other cancer simply because those risks are predominantly ascribable to the thyroid dose from internal radiatition, which is unmatched in other organs.”

Congress authorized the study of the iodine isotope – but limited it to the iodine isotope. Strontium-90, another fallout factor, has never been studied.

Western man – give up your delusion that in facing evil, you are good! And look at the x-rays in your hand, dude. They tell a tale.