Chernobyl.

Recently, in the light of the end of the world approaching, I have been thinking about the nuclear weapons a lot. The facts that so many of us prefer to ignore, can't be ignored in a conversation about how and if the civilization is going to survive the conflict building up nowadays.

For example, the fact, that modern ICBMs cannot be averted, there literally is no system that can shoot them or their splitting nuclear payload off. Or the fact, that there are so many countries in the world today, that possess nuclear weapons technology, as there were major players in the WWII. Also, the standards of diplomacy have obviously fallen, and should the Caribbean Crisis happened today, we would've been dead. Guaranteed.

The number of people who have seen the world turn to ashes in the name of the futile and empty ambitions of heterosexual men has reduced to near zero. The masses forget what it means, to go to war, to have your life and dreams destroyed only because somebody has decided, that their political career is at stake. Stupidity has never had such an audience, as the Internet allows having nowadays. Mediocrity leads the political change, and with it the historical amnesia, that has consumed the western society.

The destruction the nuclear weapons will bring to this world is difficult to overestimate. Oppenheimer, Kurchatov, Sakharov, all the grandalchemists of the nuclear brotherhood have resented their contribution to the world's most monstrous horror. How is it, that Strugatsky brothers' "Picnic on the roadside" was published in 1972? Matrix, are you okay?

Kurchatov after the first nuclear explosion he created:

The atom must be a worker, not a soldier! And we must not allow it to be used otherwise.

Well-known Oppenheimer:

Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds

Sakharov:

Today, thermonuclear weapons have never been used against people in war. My most passionate dream (deeper than anything else) is that this never happens, that thermonuclear weapons deter war, but are never used.

The nuclear war cannot have a winner, no war has winners, everyone is a loser in any war. Today, we feel like we have no control over what is happening around us, but that is not true. I decided to start today, the little pacifist quest, the reminder of that thousands of drops can add up to a waterfall.

I admire the HBO miniseries "Chernobyl" from 2019, that so accurately depicts the Soviet reality of the empire in disintegration. Gorbachev himself said that he thinks that Chernobyl was the last nail in the USSR's coffin. Already strained with the arms race the Soviet economy could not handle, the low oil prices, the gerontocratic political decay, the Behemoth of the Soviet state machine was unable to handle a punch like Chernobyl.

International standing, soldiers, civilians, doctors, money and materials that were required for liquidation of the consequences were universally unprecedented. The pity attempts to cover up the tracks resulted in a global disgrace for the Soviet political leadership and, in the first place, took off the veil of secrecy around inner affairs. The state of technology, available funds and commodities, stale and stagnant economy, all of that became visible to the Soviet adversaries in the West, and so the end of the empire was near.

I grew up in a small city in Siberia, which among others has become a source of flesh for the meat grinder that Chernobyl was. My classmate's father was one of the liquidators, one of the hundreds of thousands of young men who were sent to compensate for the empty ambition and war, simple war. In his late 40s, he wore 12 diopters think glasses because his vision was failing. He had 6 tumors removed from his body to the moment his second child was 15.

Every spring I remember me and Daniel, the classmate I was referring to, having no care as the summer holidays were approaching. I hang around at his house all the time. His father would have his liquidator friends over for the anniversary. A bottle of vodka, cigarette smoke and shy Siberian spring summer beaming right through it. They talked about what happened to them.

How the days before they were conscripted, him and his pregnant wife (with the first child) were watching the television with reports of the Chernobyl incident happening. This must have been quite late into it, as the media within the Soviet Union was hiding the truth as long as is it could. He said: "I remember telling my wife, look, that's gonna be us who'll clean this shit up". His conscription was due in the next days, and he was sent to Chernobyl, as almost every conscript in that period.

He told us, all of them had personal dosimeters with them. They would go out in the morning and do all the hand work required for the containment of the disaster area, in simple words shoveling, and at the end of the day, their radiation intake would be registered in the books. Only they noticed that the dosimeter would never go above 1 millisievert, which in his case it would reach by the afternoon. As Alexey Navalny said in his autobiography "Patriot", this state was built on lies and was living it.

Another "fun" story he told us was that only the costume was provided was a chemical protection costume, not radiational protection. They worked using those for more than two weeks until the real protection came. I can only imagine what was going through their minds.

The Soviet leadership has mostly conscripted the soldiers from the peripheral parts of Russia, so if the uproar is happening, it's localized to the remote regions and not Moscow. How many young men have lost their lives and health in this historic disaster?

The scenes of soldiers and firemen suffering from radiation sickness are extremely striking. Every time I watch it I see myself in Lyudmila, I would go over any rules to get to Huzzy in such circumstances. A thought of this potentially happening to us, and it is nauseating.

At the end of this quite depressive post, I want you to think about how tragic Ukrainian modern history is. WW1, Revolution, Soviet regime and Holodomor, WW2, Soviet regime, Chernobyl, Crimea and now this pathetic measurable war.

If the god exists, he should be ashamed, as Ukrainians don't deserve it.