Chernobyl’s Safety Catch

In 1989, officials in Belarus and Ukraine declared that emissions from the Chernobyl disaster was causing a public health disaster. Few people outside the region believed them. The medical memory of the atomic bombing of Japan had by that time petrified into incontrovertible facts about the human health effects of exposure to large blasts of radioactivity. International and Soviet researchers turned to this body of data, collected by then for 35 years, to assure the public that there would be few lasting health effects from Chernobyl. Tensions built up as nuclear agencies in the U.S., France and Great Britain faced billions of dollars in lawsuits from the legacy of weapons production and testing. Brown shows how memory, Cold War politics and collapsing Soviet prestige led the world to embrace an understanding of nuclear disaster as ‘safe.’