Taking Bearings

Heroes fought bravely, but heroes were also thus anointed as poor compensation for unnecessary, and often unknowing, sacrifice. After the war was won–or more aptly a temporary truce with nature secured–those called to duty were cast adrift to lead uncertain lives.

The original Soviet-built sarcophagus surrounding stricken reactor #4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant. Ukraine. May 2014. ©LMG Photo by K. Lee Lerner. All Rights Reserved

The exclusion zone surrounding the stricken plant provides eerie evidence of abruptly interrupted lives, each bit of contaminated debris offering a sobering reminder of how perilously close a large portion of Europe came to resembling this collective of abandoned towns.

Instead of thousands of lives lost, millions might have been displaced, sickened, or killed by radioactive poisoning had it not been for, as honored by Ukrainians, “the heroes who saved the world.”

The first to fall never knew their enemy. The 28 firefighters who responded within minutes of the initial blast simply did as they were trained. They bravely fought a fire of unimaginable intensity, but the water they poured on the blaze only added radioactive steam to the flames and unseen bits of poisoned particles shooting upward into the night. Unprotected, they all died within days.

Over the next six months, when the unhardened electronics in the primitive robotics brought in to contain the nuclear inferno proved too frail, soldiers, reservists mainly, were plucked from daily life and cast into combat as “biorobots.” Before constructing a protective sarcophagus, men working shifts measured in minutes poured lead pellets by hand into the exposed reactor core.

Many of the biorobots died–either quickly from agonizing radiation burns, or from cancers developed years later–as a result of their participation in the initially ill-advised efforts to bring the reactor under control. When control proved impossible, more lives were sacrificed to prevent the melting core from striking groundwater and creating a second deadly explosion that would have catastrophically expanded the radius of the disaster. With a bit of bad luck with the weather, it is quite possible that Paris, Provence, or Rome might today lie within exclusion zones.

Hundreds of thousands of men also passed through Chernobyl as “liquidators” tasked to bury towns. The Soviet government also hoped the liquidators might bury the truth.

After spending an economically crippling $18 billion within two years, the Soviet government, already caught in a web of lies and denials over its handling of Chernobyl, desperately turned to an emphasis on glasnost, a policy of increased transparency. The move proved too little and too late. While other factors certainly played in the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union, Chernobyl alone may have quietly provided a lethal dose.

Kings and countries rise and fall, and the reasons and passions for war inevitably recede to obscurity. Wars like the one fought at Chernobyl may not, however, prove so ephemeral. The outcomes of such battles may remain visceral for hundreds of thousands of years and countless generations.

Across the centuries, calls to wage “final war” remain a common rallying cry. Such rhetoric trades on hope over history. Chernobyl provides both humbling proof of human hubris, and haunting warnings that the forces of nature are capable of indifferently waging “final war” on a scale beyond human experience or control.

Content and photo:  Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Reactor #4.  May, 2014. © K. Lee Lerner ©LMG. All commercial rights reserved. Additional photos available at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10222183724038121&type=3