So I just read an extra story I didn’t know about.
Obviously, the fallout cloud from Chernobyl was enormous and lasted for ages and the wind there blew in different directions on different days, so the cloud was headed to different places at different times.
One day, the wind blew in such a way as to send the fallout cloud in the direction of Moscow. This was completely unacceptable to the powers that were. So, this is what they did. The soviet Air Force had been experimenting with weather control systems since the Second World War, and had actually got fairly good at it. One thing they could do reliably was ‘seed’ clouds to get them to dump rain on demand. This involved flying through and then above the clouds spraying chemicals out of their planes.
So the politburo sent the Air Force teams up to seed the clouds. The horrible, lethal, radioactive clouds. They didn’t tell them, obviously. So then the radioactive rain would fall before it got to Moscow and the important people would be safe. Every person (well, man, as they were all male) who went on that mission died horribly by the age of 40. Most had limbs amputated or horrific cancers before they succumbed. They never knew what had been done to them.
Oh, the rain you ask? That fell on populated areas of what is now Belarus. They didn’t tell those people what was happening either. I suspect you can guess what the long term effects were.
My initial thought was ‘fuck me, how could someone do this then live with themselves?’ But then I look at the choice they were facing. Millions of people lived in the Moscow area. What would the effect have been if that rain had fallen on the largest urban area in the USSR? Worse? Almost certainly. Even more death. Even more suffering. I’m not sure that was foremost in the politburo’s mind when they put the plan into action, but that was the reality.
is it right to sacrifice thousands to pain and death if it means saving tens of thousands the same fate? If they’d told the pilots what the stakes were, would they have gone anyway, the same way workers went back into the reactor knowing it meant certain death but would save countless lives?
We know that the executive was stuffed with self-serving fools who made things worse. But sometimes I look at it and think… even with the best will would the decisions I’d make be different? Maybe the reasons would be, but death and agony comes to some innocent person either way.
Chernobyl is so.. massive, so apocalyptic, that even after studying it as an amateur for years I don’t feel I really have a handle on the whole scale and horror of it. That’s why the tv series is important, as much as it is good, because it helps us understand the sheer size of disaster our own folly can bring.