Voices from Chernobyl: a book review

Today is the 30th anniversary of the accident at Chernobyl. It deserves awareness. Nuclear radiation is extremely dangerous. This book is a testament to those lives lost. Read it now.

“It’s like I’m painting with water on a wall, no one knows what I’m painting, no one can guess, no one has any idea.”

Grief is an invisible weight. It is one that we all carry to varying degrees at one point or another in our lives. We live, we lose, we die ourselves. It’s grim and poetic and terribly, irreversibly true. War is something that has threaded itself through the fabric of humanity from our very conception. Though horrible, it is a concept we have studied and can understand. But our ability to split the atom, awesome though it may be, has come at a cost we’re only beginning to understand.

I had the fortunate misfortune to read this book almost immediately after finishing John Hersey’s outstanding “Hiroshima,” an account of six people’s lives who survived the first atomic bomb. Originally published in the New Yorker not long after the war, it is a harrowing tale. The residents were expecting to be bombed, but nothing could have prepared them for the instant devastation that obliterated the city and threw their lives into chaos. Structures crumbled, people were vaporized, crushed, burned. Then, the fires spread and raged and consumed that which remained.

It’s a scenario that’s difficult to imagine, much less comprehend. Movies have contextualized the pain and suffering of war. The propaganda machine splits our vision between heroes and villains, winners and losers. Think of the endless stream of World War II movies, covering everything from the storming of the beaches of Normandy to the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. Yet Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain in the dark of our cinematic vision. Why? Is it because it was too gruesome? Too shameful to reenact? Out of respect for the victims?

Instead, these weapons of mass destruction have been used as a cautionary tale of the apocalypse. Nuclear winter. Mass extinction. The rise, in some cases, of the machines. The moral of that story is that nuclear weapons are very, very bad, m’kay?

So, that’s the most obvious ramification of this technological terror we’ve constructed. One benefit of these developments is nuclear power. It’s clean, producing almost zero emissions. It’s incredibly efficient, capable of producing immense amounts of electricity. And it’s much safer than the use of coal.

Well, about that…